Read my award-winning poem, recently published in Talisman magazine.

It's about a Palestinian man I knew while living in Beirut.

For this Thursday’s post, I’m sharing “Majed’s Poem,” a work that was published in Talisman, a literary magazine. I was also awarded 3rd prize for poetry (!) Here’s a link to the digital version of the magazine. The poem is also copied below.

I wrote this poem about a man I knew while living in Beirut in 2010-2011. He was a Palestinian living in Shatila refugee camp. He taught levantine Arabic at a language school in Beirut called the Saifi Institute.

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Majed’s Poem

In Beirut there’s a man 
who lives in a silent film. 

All day he teaches foreigners his mother tongue. 
And all night he dreams of returning to his homeland. 

But he can’t. 
Return, that is. 
To Palestine. 

Each morning Majed wakes up with a song lodged deep in his heart
And try as he might, he can’t free it from his chest
So the song stays there hour after hour 
Like a precipice with no bottom 

Majed speaks all day but no one hears him. 
Nightingales fly out of his mouth 
But there is no sound but the rush of their wings

Each afternoon Majed walks to Shatila 
With a loping gait, shouldering his bag
Under a patch of sunlight you can see 
Majed’s translucent skin with all the 
Weight in his eyes
The pupils so large, they are ceramic black buttons
On a child’s doll

By evening Majed’s song has broken his heart
It has gone silent
Without the rhythm in his chest, 
Majed is no more than a specter of a man
Walking the earth with no home 

But through his wanderings, on each eve of his despair, 
Majed is reminded of where he truly lives 

The beautiful places
Where Majed becomes a spinning leaf 
Carried away by dreams spun from Requiem in D minor
Drifting through Sonatas and Partitas and Odes and Fugues 

He sighs and each harmony cures him of the silence 
They are little scrubbers removing all the black fuzz in his life
Disturbing the dust-layer that suffocates
Making the flecks spring up like glimmering particles 
They are tiny prisms of promise to behold in rays of light
The musical score to Majed’s silent film 

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The Talisman also published a prose piece I wrote about my late grandmother entitled “My Grandmother’s Garden” and a couple of my photographs. I hope you enjoy.

Starting next week, I’ll be posting on Tuesdays. See you then! Noor