It is sad when people talk about Nizar Qabbani & don't know what he really suffered & wrote

A POEM TO BALQIS

By

Nizar Qabbani

Beirut, 1981

The Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani lived most of his adult life in exile in Lebanon as a fugitive from the Syrian regime of Hafez Assad. Beirut was then a haven of intellectual freedom and political dissidence for much of the artists, poets, thinkers, and political reformers of the Arab world.

Qabbani wrote this poem in December 1981, just days after his Iraqi wife Balqis was killed in the car-bombing of the Iraqi embassy in Beirut by the Syrian Intelligence Services. The latter were operating at the time in Lebanon, as they still do today, as an integral part of the Syrian forces of occupation, claimed by the Syrians and by their Lebanese collaborators to be "brotherly Syrian Arab peacekeepers".

Thank you.
Thank you.
For my love was assassinated…
You can now have a drink over her grave

Thank you.
Thank you.
For my poem was assassinated . . .
And is there a nation on earth … except ours … that lives on assassinating poems?

Balqis…
Most beautiful queen in the history of Babel

Balqis…
Tallest palm in the land of Iraq

When she walked…
Peacocks wandered about her
Deer followed her gait

Balqis .. This pain of mine …
The ache of a poem quivering at the touch of a finger

Pray tell.. Will the wheat rise again in the fields
Now that your hair in the wind no longer weaves?

Oh, green Nineveh … My fair-haired gypsy …
Like waves on the Tigris in the spring
Adorning your feet with the prettiest of anklets

They killed you, Oh Balqis …
What Arab nation is this that assassinates…
The songs of nightingales?

What became of Chivalrous Samaou’al?
Where are you, Muhalhal, the poet hero?
Where have all the noble men of old gone?

Tribes have prounced on tribes …
Foxes have killed foxes…
Spiders have crushed spiders …

I swear by your eyes
Where slumber a million stars
I will tell, my sweet Moon, about the Arabs
Stories from far beyond Mars

Is heroism an Arab lie?
Or is History, like us, a pathological liar?

Oh Balqis, don’t fade away from me
After you the sun shines no more on these seashores

I will tell in the inquiry
That the thief was disguised as a fighter

I will tell in the inquiry
That the gifted leader is now for hire…

I will tell about the myth of enlightenment
For we are the tribe among so many…

This is our history O Balqis…
And how is a man to tell gardens from dump yards?

Balqis …
Martyr and Poem … Pure and sublime…
Sheba searches for her queen …
Don’t you hear the cheers of the crowds?

Oh most magnificent of queens …
Woman in whom Sumer in all her glory was cast

Balqis…
Gentlest of birds … Most precious of icons…
A tear rolling down the cheek of the Magdalene
Did I wrong you …
By taking you one day away from the great shores?

Each day Beirut kills one of us…
Each day it looks for one more victim…

And death is right here in our coffee cups…
In the key to our apartment…
In the flowers of our veranda…
In the pages of the newspaper…
And in the letter of the alphabet…
Here we are once again, O Balqis
Entering the Age of jahiliyyah
The Age of Ignorance

Here we are yet again…
Embarking on savagery and backwardness
On Ugliness and vileness

Here we are again…
Entering the age of barbarism

Where writing is a mad journey
Between burning shreds of shrapnel

And where assassinating a butterfly in her field…
Has become the cause…