Abubakar Ibrahim
“The lyricism of the lines and the clear sophistication of the poet who writes of war and death, but always includes beauty, makes The Book of Questions an unforgettable read. These poems explore human failings but also the power ofconnection. Incantatory in their rhythms, they remind us that, “life is…a well we return to, hoping/ to find it full.”
—Danusha Laméris
THOSE WHO PAID THE PRICE
I do not know who sold our homeland, but I saw those who paid the price.
—Mahmoud Darwish
I do not know who sold our homeland, but I have seen
the hands that paid the price—small fingers digging through
dust, a mother calling for her child beneath the rubble, a
man pressing his lips to the ruins of his home as if the walls
could still remember his name. Yesterday, a school stood here,
where children traced their futures in chalk, where laughter
climbed the walls like ivy. Now the wind whistles through
silence, picking up torn pages, half-written words, a name that
was almost learned before the airstrike came. I want to tell
you about the hospital, about the nurse who covered newborns
with her body, as if her spine could become a shield, as if her ribs
could hold back the fire. She did not die a soldier, but her
hands still carried the weight of war. I do not know who sold
our homeland, but I have seen the price in the hollowed eyes
of fathers, in the way a woman kisses the photograph of her
dead son as if lips could wake the lost. I have heard the cost in
the silence of libraries turned to dust, where words once
bloomed like jasmine in spring, where poetry whispered:
we are still here, before the walls fell in on themselves.
Tell me, what do you call a home when the sky no longer
knows its name? When the streets have swallowed too many
ghosts to hold the weight of the living?
ISBN 978-0-936481-66-1