You can tell from reading their poems how they are suffering.
Syrian War Poetry
Jeffrey FleishmanContact Reporter
The words are bound in blood and speak of graves and broken bones.
The poetry radiating from the Syrian civil war echoes with nostalgia, bombs and betrayals; it slips into the lives of torn-apart families and boys of defiance who have grown into men with bandoleers and Kalashnikovs. It is the verse of the forsaken in a nation of madmen with black flags, cities of ruin and rivers of refugees.
The poems flow in slipstreams of syllables, beats and rhythms composed by writers, doctors, mothers, activists and Syrians who live abroad but are compelled to articulate the suffering in their ancestral land. They are all connected: The old man in a Turkish refugee camp clings to a few pages of his scribbled verse. Syrian American hip-hop artist Omar Offendum riffs through songs of admonition and loss. And Amal Kassir summons the blistered hands and shattered orchard on her grandmother's farm.
My grandmother knows Syria better than anyone.
It is the arthritis living in her knees.
She had a farm whose dust she knew by name.
... And the tyrant,
The dirt is waiting for him.
Like the rest of us,
He will learn his grave,
Feel the weight of the entire country on his chest.
Continue reading at:
'Poetry is a witness' to suffering wrought by Syria's civil war
Syrian War Poetry
Jeffrey FleishmanContact Reporter
The words are bound in blood and speak of graves and broken bones.
The poetry radiating from the Syrian civil war echoes with nostalgia, bombs and betrayals; it slips into the lives of torn-apart families and boys of defiance who have grown into men with bandoleers and Kalashnikovs. It is the verse of the forsaken in a nation of madmen with black flags, cities of ruin and rivers of refugees.
The poems flow in slipstreams of syllables, beats and rhythms composed by writers, doctors, mothers, activists and Syrians who live abroad but are compelled to articulate the suffering in their ancestral land. They are all connected: The old man in a Turkish refugee camp clings to a few pages of his scribbled verse. Syrian American hip-hop artist Omar Offendum riffs through songs of admonition and loss. And Amal Kassir summons the blistered hands and shattered orchard on her grandmother's farm.
My grandmother knows Syria better than anyone.
It is the arthritis living in her knees.
She had a farm whose dust she knew by name.
... And the tyrant,
The dirt is waiting for him.
Like the rest of us,
He will learn his grave,
Feel the weight of the entire country on his chest.
Continue reading at:
'Poetry is a witness' to suffering wrought by Syria's civil war
