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

A Medicine to Strengthen the Cough

A patient came to a doctor and complained of the weakness of his hearing — to the point that he could not hear his cough when he coughed.

The doctor said to him: No matter, I shall give you an effective remedy. The patient brightened and said: It strengthens the sense of hearing? Said the doctor: No — but it will make you cough a cough so loud that you will hear it.

A thief stole the slippers of the Imam al-Shafi'i from the mosque. When the Imam came out and found his slippers stolen, he began pondering how he might get home. While he was thus engaged, the servant arrived carrying a pair of slippers and said that a man had come to the house saying: The Imam's slippers have been stolen, so take him a pair to put on. And al-Shafi'i used to tell this anecdote on every occasion, in admiration of this light-spirited thief.

"The Mad Poets" at West Hall

Professor Musa Sulayman, professor in the Arabic Department of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the American University in Beirut, delivered a talk entitled "The Mad Poets" at the West Hall forum; it was a valuable study.