Plant, Don't Cut

The tree wants no crowds
in the public squares,
and it wants no drums and sham
and official delegations.
It wants a sturdy pickaxe and a yoke,
and it wants a river running full,
and it wants you to come to it early—
it gives you tender fruit.

There is nothing left with us in Lebanon,
no green tree that gives shade;
we inherited, from the science of eloquence,
a dried-up plain with no watering.

Famous Lebanon has its needs—
so a blessing on the shovels
and the tune of the mattock's strokes
pecking at the minds of the learned.

He needs money so he can rest
and be able to plant his lands—
not a begging bowl for the peasant
and a bank that makes his livelihood fly away!...

And he can no longer wait patiently
for God's bounty to provide for him,
and he needs a magnifying spyglass
to see the piaster in his hand.

It needs the Lebanese man, deprived
of Lebanon and its waters,
to come back from the Mahjar and rise up,
to go forth and till his lands.

He needs, he needs, he needs much:
he needs to come up out of the drowning,
he needs a remedy for wretchedness
and a begging bowl that gathers piasters...

He needs to plant, not cut,
and to keep steadily at the labor,
so that at his ease he can climb
the ladder of independence.

If only I had been born a peasant,
without this pen and this quill!
I would be smelling the apples
in the shelter of the vine-arbor,
and milking the comely goats,
and making cheese and curds,
and passing my life at ease
with the birds of the wild.

I would live contented all my life,
from garden to garden
I would wander and pick fruit,
refreshing my eye with the view;
I would doze to the river's mawwal,
my blanket the sky, my bed the flowers,
and my pillow a handful of rock,
and my ways Lebanese.

Emile Mubarak