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Poetry

Besieged

by Omar Sabbagh

(After more attacks in Beirut)

It is morning again, but they have killed
the morning. The book of life is blood-smattered
and death is all we read, words and phrases
becoming pages, horrid leaf without leave, dog-eared.

Even the connoisseurs of doubt
find a certain sort of tragic surety here
and are maddened by it, becoming strangers to themselves –
the world about them, the world they’re used to,
filled with the shrapnel of a blind man’s hate, the grapeshot
that is half a minus number, half a square root…

But for them it’s an old and selfsame story: besieged,
a sinister knife at the throat, the unseen rage
of an enemy caught in the cage of its own brittleness –

a coward from a distance, winning by flame and fire alone,
a foreigner to the morning, a ghost behind the sun.

Omar Sabbagh is a poet, writer and critic. His latest books are: Y KNOTS: Short Fictions (Liquorice Fish Books, 2023), For Echo (Cinnamon Press, 2024) and Night Settles Upon the City (Daraja Press, 2024). He also teaches English Literature and Creative Writing at the Lebanese American University (LAU).