Portside

To Amal (Because your name means hope)

By Hedy Habra

How can one think of better

days when streets

swarm

with armed men,

their uniforms

changing

with

the drift of war

their faces the same,

their eyes, your son's eyes.

Amal, your name means hope,

yet years

go by, darkening

days with violent ink,

night's pulse

resounding

through splattered walls,

treacherous alleys.

And what’s left

of your sweet name,

when deafened

by the sound of anger,

you dream you're lost in Beirut's

neighborhoods,

in search

of a way home

in the midst

of rubble,

faceless gunmen

check your ID

for a Cross or a Crescent,

at every intersection.

Unable to withhold your boy's finger

from the trigger,

you lie,

your nightmare, a faint echo

of raging battles.

Hedy Habra’s third poetry collection, The Taste of the Earth, is forthcoming from Press 53 (2019). Tea in Heliopolis won the USA Best Book Award and was finalist for the International Poetry Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes was finalist for the USA Best Book Award and the International Poetry Book Award. Her story collection, Flying Carpets, won the Arab American Book Award’s Honorable Mention and was finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award. A recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Awards, she was a fourteen-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work appears in Cimarron Review, Bitter Oleander, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Drunken Boat, Gargoyle, Mizna, Nimrod, Poet Lore, and Verse Daily. Her website is hedyhabra.com