I Grant You Refuge
1.
I grant you refuge
in invocation and prayer.
I bless the neighborhood and the minaret
to guard them
from the rocket
from the moment
it is a general’s command
until it becomes
a raid.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones who
change the rocket’s course
before it lands
with their smiles.
2.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones now asleep like chicks in a nest.
They don’t walk in their sleep toward dreams.
They know death lurks outside the house.
Their mothers’ tears are now doves
following them, trailing behind
every coffin.
3.
I grant the father refuge,
the little ones’ father who holds the house upright
when it tilts after the bombs.
He implores the moment of death:
“Have mercy. Spare me a little while.
For their sake, I’ve learned to love my life.
Grant them a death
as beautiful as they are.”
4.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and death,
refuge in the glory of our siege,
here in the belly of the whale.
Our streets exalt God with every bomb.
They pray for the mosques and the houses.
And every time the bombing begins in the North,
our supplications rise in the South.
5.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and suffering.
With words of sacred scripture
I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous
and the shades of cloud from the smog.
I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.
Translated by Huda Fakhreddine,1
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1 Huda Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University
of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill) and The Arabic
Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press), and the co-editor of The
Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge). She is also the author of a book of creative
nonfiction, Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time Under a Different Sun), and Wa min
thamma al-ālam (And Then the World). She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an
editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.