Almost nothing happens
Other than the sound of cars outside.
With deep faith
Parents pronounce the names of the dead as a
family approach,
And imagine scenes of mothers preparing
delicious sandwiches for their children going to
school.
Here, death is the accepted truth .
Almost nothing happens
But the provocative soldier’s gun make her
soundlessly clean up the dismembered small
head.
And the sadness that grips the reputation of
the place
Justifies playing the national anthem as a sym-
bol of survival .
Almost nothing happens
Except the optimism concerning the new world
makers’ visions.
We are hostages of war, we put love in our
pierced pockets
And lengthily stand in front of the mirror
To practice laughing.
I will tell the boys and girls I will later have
That their father was cruel and very kind
I’ll tell them a stupid secret
When I thought I loved
I named their father Sun, moon, and star
He was not as handsome as Alan Dillon or as
romantic as Nour El Sharif in the famous movie
”My Love Always”.
He did not read the letters of Anaïs Nin and
Henry Miller
Maria Margaret once imagined him in the novel
”The Narrator of the Movies”, provocatively
reviewing his geographical information on the
exact relationship between the ozone hole and
extreme heat.
He accuses my food of being deficient in salt
And my poems of being like death when he
became a friend of families in war.
He sees me as a perfect, naive woman
With her world made up of successive layers of
laughter, weeping, and a modicum of certainty
A woman
Hates everything related to numbers
And loves Tunis Moftah’s voice in her song ”IF
you love me…stay near to me”.
I do not read poetry that is called patriotic
I do not listen to patriotic songs
I did not miss my appointment to bid
Farewell to the man I loved
In my room which I have not left since yester-
day
Life seems like a long and boring thread
Like a failed woman in love
Failed in her motherhood
She didn’t care about the issues they call fateful
In my room, which I haven’t left since yesterday
I followed with great interest the feng shui
programs,
And I came out with a convincing result
That I have no energy to attract,
I suffer from tension, anxiety, and other incom-
prehensible things
My friend rejects these claims completely
She recommended me a very excellent fortune
teller, according to her
She told me that there is a (curse) that follows
me continuously
My future projects are stuck
For treatment, I must regularly use gravel salt,
black pepper and a lot of nonsense.
In my room, which I haven’t left since yester-
day,
I hear a long laugh.
Am I crazy in a world that doesn’t seem to be
much different from me ?
Kholoud Al-Falah is a journalist and poet.
He lives in Benghazi, Libya
