The Clock Chimed

I wrote this poem after the beginning of the trial of the uprooted Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak, his sons and ministers in Cairo, and their first appearance together in the court cage, Wednesday August 3, 2011.

It is a gift from my heart and conscious to the Egyptian people. It was recited it in public for the first time it in the Poetry Event and Mourning Dinner, Sunday September 18, 2011 in the Arab American Cultural Center, Houston, Texas, along with other poems honoring the martyrs of the revolutions in Palestine, Tunisia, Yemen, Libya and Syria.

The clock chimed

Finally

The clock chimed and the time came

The injustice has ended in the court cage

Decades of oppression have ended with it

Heads have bend and flags have fallen

The thieves have been arrested

Their plans and dreams have come to a dead end

They separated the brothers and starved the people

They made peace with the enemy after they dropped the sword

They blasted churches and surrounded mosques

They bought the conscience and seized the media

They divorced shame and deserted the morals

They killed the mercy and distanced relatives from each other

They turned from rulers to contractors

They turned the people from humans to numbers

So they paid the price of what they did

The arrows they launched turned against them

The grandsons of Saad brought back the true meaning to independence

They turned the ‘thought to be giants’ of the government to dwarfs

And the grandsons of Oraabi gave back the revolution its brilliance

They made the squares forbidden places for thugs

If the people stand as one hand

They can demolish kingdoms and erase hallucinations

Seeing them behind bars was a dream

But it became today a medal on the chest of the people

***

Poetry by: Tarif Youssef-Agha

Houston, Texas

September 2011

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