The Lost Arabs by Omar Sakr

Author:Omar Sakr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Published: 2020-01-07T20:51:59+00:00

*When I wrote this poem in 2017, I was referring to statistics from 2016. As I write this in 2018, I can tell you that in 2017 America dropped 40,000 bombs. From 2014 to 2017, at least 94,000 bombs. In my lifetime alone, the sheer tonnage of destruction and chaos that has been unleashed on majority Muslim or Arab nations has been nothing short of catastrophic, year after year of staggering violence that the population of Western countries seem to accept. Go back further, past my lifetime, my mother’s, and into my grandfather’s and you will still find ample military campaigns and Western-backed violences to highlight the sustained injustice against Arab peoples. You could not do this to those you saw as fully human. Though I had not the heart to seek out the full body count of Iraqis, Afghanis, Syrians, Yemenis, Palestinians—the refugees drowned in wave after generational wave of forced migration, of certain death at home or a bleakening hope abroad—the munitions alone tell a deadly, horrifying story.

AT THE SITE OF THE

FUTURE MEMORIAL

I will learn every dead body is impossibly foreign.

Still, their names my name will be lodged

in throats. I will replace the lost with my blood.

I have never given so much of myself before

and, having fucked men this year, usually

I would not be allowed. Aren’t you all the same

will echo through loudspeakers as the guilt

-stricken meander in, awe-splotched &

delirious. Look at what we did. Look

how easy it was.

There will be a fountain splashing blackness &

haphazard TVs showing only National

Geographic. I remember laughing at my father who was

fond of invoking the Afghani kings in our blood.

He burned to be special, to etch glory in these bones.

What does it say about me that I call on the erased,

the shrapnel song of gone? Now that my father is gone

I will try to make a crown for him to wear

and say without irony that we kingdomed Western

Sydney, we wore exquisite costumes. Though imaginary,

it will be rich with gems. I keep annihilating homelands

by turning my back I keep surviving somehow.

I may not be alive for the sight of the future

memorial, in which case it is important to note

I am a writer and to write is to squander life.

It is the only reason I have a place here.

Aren’t you all the same? I don’t recognise

the photos here, and I do. Some of the legs

blown off bodies, those with jeans still on,

could be mine. I use memory to make them

walk again. God, do not let me anywhere

near memory, I beg of you. I keep using it

as a weapon. It is the only thing I know

how to do and that should tell you everything.

AT THE SITE OF THE

FUTURE MEMORIAL

I will illegally build my own Statue of Liberty

alone night and day for a hundred years if need be

and need be

so when I am done I can blow her head off

and fill the jagged cup of her skull

with tears that will not freeze

nor dissipate but always drip

down her stern jaw, her arms, her perfect

dress and into the upturned thirst

of anyone unlucky enough to stand in her shadow.

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