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