It No Longer Matters
If Anyone Loves Us

It no longer matters
if anyone loves us.
The love of the great angel
in his bright white sky
is enough.

Our children see him standing in the distance,
holding his hands in the shape of a heart
and they smile.

Our women see him waving a sprig of white jasmine
and close their eyes once
and forever.
Our men see his blue wings
as clear as a sky.
Their hearts are seized,
and they set out toward him.

It no longer matters
if anyone loves us.
Bombs have liberated us from our ears,
with which we used to hear words of love.
Rockets have liberated us from our eyes,
with which we used to see loving glances.
Hate-filled words have liberated us from our hearts,
in which we used to cherish the enchantments of love.

It no longer matters
if anyone, in this world, loves us.
“It seems to have been an unreciprocated love, anyway,”
say our elders, now exhausted by the idea of land.
Our poet stands on the distant horizon and proclaims:
“Save us from your cruel love!”
He then whispers, apologizing for an earlier, childish optimism:
“On this Earth,
nothing deserves life.”

It no longer matters
if anyone loves us.
We are tired of words, the said and the unsaid,
tired of hands that reach out but do not touch,
of eyes that see but do not see.
We are tired of ourselves in this endless night,
and tired of our mothers clinging to what’s left of us,
tired of this rock we carry on our backs,
this eternal curse.
From abyss to abyss, we carry it,
from death to death,
and we never arrive.

It no longer matters, after this, if anyone loves us,
or if anyone walks in our funerals.
Here we go in silence, toward the final abyss.
We hold each other’s hands,
go forth alone in this desert of a world.
At some moment, one of us, a child, will look back,
will cast one last glance at the ruins, and
shedding a single tear, will say:
“It no longer matters that anyone loves us.”

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.