Gentle Rain!!
Fouad Suleiman
... You have withheld it, O God, from Your earth and from Your servants — and so You have withheld goodness and giving...
And You have withheld from men the warmth of the hearth.
O God!
How the hearts have longed for it.
The hearth in the house sits in desolation; there is no fire in it... sad, forsaken.
In the corners of the house it asks itself:
Where, I wonder, are the palms of hands?
It is as if my heart were dying of this frost!!
... And the spring at home in the village is bewildered; it does not know why it has sunk deep into the earth...
There is not a drop of water in it.
And as it remembered things, the rock, at this season, would be pouring with life,
and the crossings and the paths, time after time after time...
And not one grain of the good has sprouted yet,
and on the face of this Your servant, the tiller of the good, there is a grim scowl.
An unbelieving blasphemy almost slips from between his lips...
though his heart and his tongue have known nothing but prayer,
and his mouth does not know the taste of blasphemies.
Pour it down, O God, pour it down!
For the hearts have withered from its withholding.
Pour it down, for the plow longs for the soil,
and the hand of our neighbor in the village — this idleness cuts into it.
Pour it down, O God, for the earth is thirsty,
and our wells have gone dry... and water with us is scarce.
O gentle rain of bounty,
pass over our land and pour down;
anoint it with the blessings of heaven.
For there is no soil on earth better than our soil.
Pour down, gentle rain of bounty, pour down.
And tomorrow is the appointed time of the good, with the first waking —
God willing.
The Story of Literature
... Literature dies on the earth, but it does not die among us, in Lebanon.
For color — we have wiped the letters with it, wiped them well, and the letter has risen shining in the radiance of color.
And we have rubbed this Arabic letter with perfume, so that the letter sprouts from our pens as the rose sprouts, red and velvet.
... And the mind — we have spread its sail over the sea, and toward the moon, and we have gathered up from its path the nets of illusions, and the mind has stretched its wing, hovering over the land of men... and the land of men was barren...
... And poetry among us has stretched the rhyme to the very edge of heaven... and the roads of the stars have opened wide in the rhymes of our poets.
Meter with us no longer has a limit, nor has rhyme; the word has become a summit, and the summit a mountain, and the mountain a sky — and the sky, with all that is in it, has become one with all that is in us.
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That is the story of the Lebanese — our own story, we who write literature in Lebanon... a beautiful story, like all our stories in this country...
Literature dies on the earth, and it does not die among us.
Fouad Suleiman
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