The Poem of Love and Revolution

Ripe Red cold tomatoes at midnight
with salt
Rhythms of Winter outside my door

How I would like to Tango with you…
Rub my feet ontop of yours beneath a yellow
blanket

Let my bare flesh feel the sting of winter
Early morning in October while I surf your lips

Embrace me in the cold of October
Coming to an end before us like a heart-attack

Kiss my embittered lips
Feel the anger inside my jugular veins

There my blood boils
Can you sense it flow?
Warm and Red seeping through
and through

forgotten like an after-thought

They say we can not win
Bedouins of the past
Sultans of the Harem

But we have been ruled for 1400 yrs. by the
Khalifah, Ameer el-Momeneen
One hundred years backward by the Ottoman Majesty

We are ignorant, worthless, impotent, regressive,
and of glory past…

But I say we are strong
Three hundred million can’t you see ?

******************************
Kiss me hard before I fall from the world’s grace
Or from your arms

Did I say I love you in October?

Hear my voice call Revolution
Give me bread, your love, and freedom

Must they exploit us all
for our people to rise like the tide?

Must our tragedy hit every home
before we eat from off of their flesh?

Must we incur a death in every home
A loss, a disability?

Whether from starvation, occupation, or worse
still
loss of dignity?

No
My people are strong
I say…

From Baghdad to Haifa
From Yaffa to Algiers

We are hungry for a future and we are capable we
are strong

Beware we are thousands in the streets
from Morocco to Cairo

We will eat the flesh of our exploiters
We will crush those who occupy us
those who enslave us from within…

We are not a consumer society to be consumed?
A market place for an “Israeli” shopping spree...

We will purge this cancer from within us
Those who sell our future for a Mercedes Benz

Shall meet our young
and Klashinkovs

Those who wholesale us
For a Red carpet and marble Italian homes

When we live in dirt
and they pay for their gambling debts with our
blood

Our homes see no carpets red or other
Our children their skulls the cups of wine
for our oppressors to drink from

Each day we grow
Our dreams are strengthened
by our determination

We are ten strong
We are one hundred strong
We are one thousand strong
We are one million strong
and we grow....

Watch us march on
Our eyes are wide open, hopeful, and clear
Our fists solid waving in the air
Our steps steadfast and forward
our heads proud and raised high

We progress, we evolve, we become victory
embodied
We are from the gulf to the sea
From the sea to the gulf

We have our chains to lose
We have a world to win

By: Ziad Shaker el-Jishi