Beirut is described as a city full of contradictions, the most prominent of which is the combination of the warmth and the richness of beauty and the memories of death as a result of the repeated destruction it witnessed.
Beirut remained the passion of nostalgia for poets in the modern era, and an arena for the intense poetic presence, which sings nostalgia for it and life in it, despite the calamities that beset it.
Among these poets, poets emerged: the Syrian Nizar Qabbani, the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish, and the Lebanese Gibran Khalil Gibran, and commentators on social media sites - after the recent Beirut explosion - found in their poems a habitat and refuge for nostalgia, in poetic words full of love and sorrow for the city that lived in recent decades. Bitter.
Female Beirut
Qabbani began as a passionate poet seeking love, beauty and women, and ended in optional exile in a desperate and frustrating situation of a disjointed Arab scientist, but he achieved an unprecedented breakthrough in terms of the relationship of poetry to the audience, as his collections spread among wide groups of readers thanks to the simplicity of his language, the boldness of its contents, and his lyric rhythm.
Qabbani has a special relationship with Beirut, where his wife, Belqis, was killed in the bombing that shook the Iraqi embassy in Beirut, which contributed to forming an emotional, charged image of the Syrian poet towards the city in which he lived, loved and lost his girlfriend.
Qabbani lamented his wife saying, "I will say in the investigation ... that I have known the killers ... Belqis ... oh my beautiful horse .. I am from all my shy history ... this is a country where horses are killed ... I will say in the investigation: how my princess was raped ... and how they shared hair What is going on like rivers of gold .. I will say how they drained her blood. "
In his poem "Beirut, Love and Rain," Qabbani says:
"Love for Beirut does not have maps ...
No, no, for love in my chest maps ..
So look for an apartment that is buried by sand ..
Look for a hotel whose lovers are not asking for their names ..
Watch me in the catacombs that are not ..
Not sung and a statement ..
Decide where you are ..
For love in Beirut is like God everywhere. "
He says in his poetry “To the Female Beirut with My Love” (1981) in his famous poem, which many sang after the recent Beirut explosion:
O six world, Beirut
Who sold your sapphire bracelets?
Whoever confiscated your magic ring,
And cut your golden braids?
Who slaughtered the joyful sleep in your green eyes?
From scratching your face with a knife,
And put fire water on your adorable lips?
Who poisoned the sea water and sprinkled hatred on the pink beaches?
Here we came .. apologized .. and confessed
We shot you with a tribal spirit
We killed a woman who was called "freedom."
-
O six world, Beirut
Oh where is the first promise .. and the first love
Oh where we wrote poetry
We hid it with velvet bags
We now admit that we were Beirut,
We love you as the nomadic nomads
We practice the act of love completely
Like nomads.
Now admit that you were our girlfriend
We sleep for your bed all night
And at dawn, we migrate like nomads
We now admit that we were illiterate
We were ignorant of what we were doing
We now admit that we were among the murderers
And we saw your head
It falls under the roach's rocks like a bird
Confess now
That we were - an hour the judgment was executed in you -
False witnesses.
-
We confess before one God
We were jealous of you
And your beauty hurt us
Confess now
We did not do justice to you ... and we did not excuse you. We did not understand you
We guided you in the place of the rose with a knife
We confess before the just God
Anna Rudnak
We tied you
We lost you
And blamed us for our transgressions
O six world, the world after you is not enough for us
Now we know that your roots are rooted in us
Now we know what our hands did.
Get up from under the blue wave, Ishtar
National poem as a rose
Or national as a poem of fire
There is nothing before you .. something after you .. something like you
You are summaries of ages
Oh pearl field
O port of love
And peacock water
National for love, and for poets
National for bread, and for the poor
Love wants you .. O sweetest queens
And the Lord wants you .. O sweetest queens
Here you have paid your good tax like all favors
And you paid the tribute for all the words.
-
I still love you, crazy Beirut
O river of blood and gems
I still love you, Beirut, the kind heart
Oh Beirut, chaos
Oh Beirut, the infidel hunger ... and the unbelieving satiety
I still love you Beirut Justice
O Beirut of injustice
Hey Beirut captivity
And Beirut is the murderer and poet
I still love you, Beirut Love
And Beirut slaughtered from artery to artery
I still love you despite the foolishness of man
I still love you, Beirut ..
Why not start now?
Gibran and Beirut
Gibran was born in 1883 in the town of Bcharre (North Lebanon) on the slopes of Mount Cedar, and immigrated to Boston in the United States with his mother in 1898 and died in 1931 from tuberculosis, and he remained until the last days of his life nostalgia for Beirut, and he said about his country:
Lebanon Does chairs have rice like a crown that makes them fade away
If only that rice was our motto ... with its steadfastness and jarring arms
I was driven by a pot, so what ... Ignorant and what was meant
If she looked up, she would not have ribed nor ... firmly or whipped
Her thunderbolt red smiles ... She has the freshness of joy and joy
Al-Ghusun sees every greenhouse ... from which it emits and irrigates the trigger
It arrested an exclamation from the work of God in ... Lebanon between Shawamekh and Wuhad
The Palestinian poet who mourned Beirut
The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish opened his famous poem "In Praise of the Shadow of the World" with the elegance of Beirut, which witnessed periods of the most important life of Darwish, before he left, avoiding a fierce civil war and an Israeli invasion of it.
Darwish said in his poem:
"A sea for the new September. Our autumn comes close to the doors ...
A sea of bitter hymn. We prepared the whole poem for Beirut.
Sea to midday
Sea for the flags of the bathroom, for our shadow, for our individual weapon
A sea of uninhabited time
For your hands, how much wave has your hands stolen
From the sign and waiting for me
Lay down our shape for the sea. Place a storm sack at the first rock
Carry your free time ... and break
... and the heart was able to throw a window of his last greeting,
The heart was able to howl, and prepare the wilds
With free crying ...
In his poem, "Beirut," Darwish says:
Surreptitiously: we seek
Beirut is our tent
Beirut is our star
And a window overlooking the sea bullets
A street is robbed of us all
Beirut is a shadow
She is more beautiful than her poem and easier than people talk
Tempt us with a thousand open start and new alphabets:
Beirut is our only tent
Beirut is our only star
Did we lie on her willow to measure bodies erased by the sea from ours? We came to Beirut from our first names
We search for the ends of the south and the bowl of the heart ...
Ask the heart, ask ...
Did we lie on the ruins in order to weigh the north with the handcuffs?
Shadow money is money on me, it broke me and scattered me
And the shadow lasted long ...
To please the trees that pleased to carry us from the necks
A cluster of dead without cause ...
We came from a country without countries
We came from the hands of classical and tired ...
The ruins of this land stretching from the Prince's palace to our cells
And from our first dreams to ... firewood
So we gave one wall to shout, Beirut
We were given a wall to see a horizon and a window of flame
We were given a wall to hang Sodom on
Which was divided into twenty kingdoms
To sell oil .... The Arab
And we gave one wall
To shout at the peninsula
Beirut is our last tent
Beirut is our last star