Thus Spoke Bashar

Thus Spoke Bashar

By Tarif Youssef Agha

Oh my great people, listen to me!

I salute your struggle and also the fact that you are a herd of sheep

I will keep riding your backs forever

I will slaughter my opponents and give hay to those who obey

I will plant fear in your hearts and brains

I will make fear get into your spinal cord

And as long as I’m the one who is ruling you

I promise you that you stay at the bottom

And that you become an example of the cowards

And that you will be called ‘the people of the famine’

I promise to make you homeless and send you all over the globe

And to destroy your future by forcing you to flee

I will turn the Homeland map into a painting

A painting that shows your corpses preyed on by hyenas and street dogs

And over all that, I promise you that

I and my thugs will rape and rob you

I will turn your necks into settlements for knives

And will use your blood as ink to write my memoir

I will import for you the worst people from all over the world

People who sold their brain or their conscious

Those who escape my explosive barrels will end in the hand of ISIS

Or will end dead after being swallowed by the sea

I will make you wish to return to my dad’s days

I will pull you from your roots in the cruelest way possible

He should go to see a mental doctor the one who

Still thinks that I’m the enemy of Israel

And the fact that I’m a butcher, a betrayer and a traitor is

A fact that doesn’t need a certificate of invention

***

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 September 5, 2014, Houston, Texas

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