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