I am battered and beaten,

I cannot even articulate what I feel

I see my reflection in a shard of broken mirror

I cannot even recognize the image looking back at me

I am faceless to the whole world

I don’t know who I am anymore

Oh Dear God, why have you left me here,

wasting away to nothingness

On these streets of Syria

I have trudged the roads of my childhood memories till my legs felt like lead

I have listened to songs of my brothers and sisters all wiped out and extinct

At twilight, I could hear their screams in my head,

I could taste their blood on my wounds

Hot and flowing as red volcanic lava

It is just my forlorn soul and I

With my clothes tattered to pieces

And my heart crushed to smithereens,

I am further humiliated by the

Machiavellian greetings of shrapnel from those western devils—

How many more of me will be shredded and massacred

On these Streets of Syria?

I have walked a thousand pathways

I have struggled to cross seas towards more fruitful beginnings

Only to sink mercilessly to my culpable death

I am already dead before I could even leave my war-torn world

The treacherous Mediterranean has engulfed my existence

Washed ashore as a rotten carcass of human debris

Cast aside as a broken net of plummeting dreams

I am shipwrecked like a water-logged vessel lost beneath a tumultuous ocean

Oh, Dear God, will you not take some time to throw a drowning man a life-line?

Or would You rather embrace me with your faithful kiss

as I choke and wither away in my torment fleeing these Streets of Syria?

It is ordained that a martyred life lasts forever—

That’s the Almighty’s words

The Angel of Death has summoned me by name

(However it is not the Archangel Isra’eel)

but Assad

who has deceptively taken on the identity of the Grim Reaper —

And he is here to steal my dejected and desolate spirit

To plunder my innocence

And pillage me off my dignity

Please, Humanity, do not turn away from me,

Do not snub us

We do not want to die alone

We cannot disappear anonymously

We cannot perish decapitated and butchered to pieces by these savages

We cannot diminish unaccounted for

Beneath the bloody soil of the Streets of Syria

I think there are times I have known what

The meaning of my life holds

And when I see God’s light,

I know I will find peace

Running through my once-remarkable Suriya—

Your ruins and rubble bear witness to my land’s rape, battery and assault

These lifeless walls will testify to the horrors of those lost in battle

All the innocent corpses of our little boys and girls will be atoned for

All the death and destruction will be punished for

Oh, My beautiful Bilad Al Sham—

The Land of Saintly Love

The cradle of Islamic civilization

A place I will always call my motherland

God knows I am not the source for these atrocities and monstrosities inflicted

So I freely and joyfully give my last breath just to put up a brave fight

For whatever morsels and crumbs of my country that is left

For this is the way to unconditionally die for the Love of my Homeland

and hereby live immortally within the Streets of Syria