Shall we have fortified our city with high walls

And chosen a king among our elders to rule

A place of no songs, a keep for no splendors?

Yet these, the lands of our fathers still buried here,

Rose from the earth from the sweat of their toil,

What we inherit from them must not be called common.

 

Who has despoiled the birthright of our ancestors,

Pulling asunder this generation from its sobbing mother,

With her face now dolled in harlotry for its new lords,

Her plundering purposed by the cold hands of suited cadavers

Offering thirty silver coins for our mineral rights and homes?

My city humble, never exalted yet my own, my roots supplanted

For the season of olives ends and lavish lavender takes my place…

Your culture made the bastard child of a soulless Everywhere,

Your buildings concrete blocks in decorum of modern retrograde

Under guise of glory, I see you sold at market for a servant’s price,

Despising and rejecting your children for any cruel nightly prince

That invites their mercenaries of faraway places and babbling tongues

To dwell in hovels as to make all the places of Earth foreign for us…

There stands the grass, the superlatives for our elegies.

 

I relinquished not my memories,

However much I reproached the highway signs as I departed

Crying out to that name branding this claim of our forefathers,

Why torment us by using this name, of whom you are no longer?

If our lamentations might have been seeds,

That our frustrations could water soil fecund,

May have we never be exiled from this land our own,

This one strip of earth we strove to find shade, to find home?