To Abu Fouad

Farouk

... These are living, pulsing pictures of village life among us — the writer Fouad Suleiman lived them and loved them, and his pen wished to immortalize them, lest they be lost from our literature as they have been lost from our lives...

*

The most precious thing we had was our blessed old men... Truly, those men were a blessing in our lives... In their days we knew neither hunger nor nakedness.

Our chests were full of grain and of all the good things of the earth. And our great wardrobes were stacked with robes of silk.

And the earth was generous in their days, and their hearts were generous in the love of the earth... and their hands knew nothing but giving... They give, and God fills the belly of the earth with good things and gives to them...

And he lived long, till he had had his fill of years; his figure never bent, nor his frame twisted, nor his voice dried up; his hands never wearied, nor his legs tired.

Overflow, O earth — overflow, and fill the houses with wheat and dibs and honey and wine and oil and olives...

*

Shall I tell you the story of those blessed ones?! And who among men does not know their story... the story of the blessing... But for them, no green vine would have grown in the land of Lebanon, nor an olive tree, nor a mulberry tree... But for them, the land of Lebanon would have remained rock and wilderness, where nothing comes up but thorns...!!

*

Those men are gone... nothing of them remains in the mountain country but the broken plowshare and the abandoned pickax...

*

... And the last peasant in my village died a year ago... After him no strong peasants remained in my village to drive the plowshare into the dry soil of the earth so that it sinks deep, under the thick, hard palms... He was a peasant of true stock; his roots went deep into the earth, and the earth reached into every vein of him.

*

No daybreak ever found him but there, with the land — picking, or sowing, or planting, or cutting... and no night ever wrapped him but on the soil of a field, under a trellis or under an oak...

*

He was strong, tall as the oak, fearsome as a specter; in his voice were tones we know in our village only from the old tales... His voice would carry, night and day, from above our valleys, and its echo would ring around the sides of the village...

And at times the whole village, hearing his voice, would reckon that some mouth had reached out to Abu Wahib's plantings somewhere...

We had, in the mountain country, sweet and precious things... We did not know their worth until they went out and were gone, and with them went the good life in the mountain country.

And no one knows — will bounty return to the Lebanese mountain? And will happiness return?