Adele Ne Jame-ll
The Corniche, Now as Then
If you are a friend of God, fire is your water.
Rumi
1.
It’s the jewel of West Beirut—
moonshell of the Mediterranean
and at sunset aglitter– even as
the bread peddler labors past you,
loaves hanging from his bicycle,
going who knows where with such a load—
even as the women walk leisurely
with their arms around each other— as if
out of an Impressionist painting,
even as the young fellows
in sweats turn their backs to the seawind,
cell phones pressed to their ears
sweet talking their girls —you think
like any other beautiful place in the world–
Bombs falling like rain for years,
you never thought it could be like this.
The evening call to prayer, fish on a wire,
salt air, an opal and mauve sky.
2.
As the sun fires round— and falls
into night, waves hit the seawall and
collapse back into themselves,
you think of your father—
all our fathers— standing exactly here,
just boys leaning over this railing,
looking out at the Bay of St. George,
imagining the world—
(France to the Americas,
those great clippers S-42s Miami to Rio)—
but unable to imagine the great war or
how much the leaving would cost them.
3.
Later at a sea bar where you have found
a table on your own, and where
you drink red wine from the Bekaa valley,
the incoming tide washes over
the stone floor the way forgetting
washes over everyone— now as then.
Young folks drink iced arrak and
smoke hookahs in the warm easy night—
as if no Skyhawks ever delivered
their whistling payloads here—
plumes of smoke spiraling
from the shoreline to the Sannine—
from Tyre to Jounieh, as if
no slick of sewage and human debris
ever floated twenty miles out to sea—
and then with the returning tide—
piled up on the sand,
waves thick as rancid butter.
As if no car bombs, one for every day of
the civil war, ever exploded
steel engines flying—spent missiles
and moon craters everywhere—
survivors like Catullus weeping
graveside for his brother, inconsolable.
4.
Ah–Beirut, they say, is like a bride
in a white flowing dress–running
along the Corniche—dodging death
mid-air—her dark hair flying
in the seawind. It’s the scent of
violets returning and returning
like her scattered children
who left their shoes behind.
It’s a beautiful elegy for
the snowy cedars of the Lord,
a dirge for the burned almond tree,
the pomegranate and the olive—
for the red earth, the desolate
and the yet unborn. It’s a mirror
inside a mirror, our lost ones
everywhere we turn and
ready for us the way the sea is ready
before we plunge into it—
into that dreamy underwater world –
into that wild and breathless current
that will, at last, hold us steadfastly.
Note:
The image of Beirut like bride comes from Zena el Khoury’s, Beirut, I Love You
The fifteen year Lebanese civil war: 1975-1990
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