If You Plan to Visit Duma

The Assad regime committed a horrifying massacre in Duma, also famous as the city of grape, in the eastern Damascus suburbs. It started on February 5, 2015 and lasted for one week; he used rockets loaded with poison gas that killed more than one hundred civilians and injured about a thousand.

If you plan to visit Duma

By Tarif Youssef Agha

If you plan to visit Duma, then don’t forget

To take with you flowers for its graves

As the butcher (Assad) who overtook Nero in reputation

Hammered the city with fire from his hatred

He leveled its houses to the ground

And rained upon its children with rockets

The city of grape became the city of death

Its streets became rivers of blood

Everything took place in front of the whole world

The world which just condemns or finds excuses

Half of it supports those crimes secretly

The other half does it openly

“Damn” the so called world leaders who watch our people blown away in pieces

Watch them every morning while enjoying a cop of coffee and a cigarette

History will spit at them every time tragedies are mentioned

It will stamp those crimes on their foreheads in shame

But also damn this time when killing became a career

While hypocrisy and dishonesty became skills

The snipers are occupying the roofs of the buildings

And the walkers in the streets are falling down, even though they are not drunk

Oh Syria, God bless you

No people were oppressed as yours were

But they will rise up from the ashes

To break the chains and destroy the walls

To raise their heads and scream

“We are the people’s who confronted the whole world”

They will keep fighting until they retrieve their dignity

And I will keep documenting their revolution with my poems

When I plan to visit Duma in the future, I will bring with me

Medals for its heroes and flowers for its graves

***

A Poem translation

(Can be shared without permission)

By Tarif Youssef-Agha

An Expatriate Arab Syrian Writer & Poet

Member of the ‘Syrian Revolutionary Writers Assembly’

Friday February 20, 2015, Houston, Texas

http://sites.google.com/site/tarifspoetry