Fatat Ghassan — A Mother's Feeling

Mrs. Fatima Sulayman al-Ahmad, known as "Fatat Ghassan." She is 46 years old. She composed poetry at an early age, and some of her poems appeared in various Arabic magazines when she was seventeen.

She was deeply affected by the political condition of the country at that time, and by the division of the sons of one homeland into differing factions, above all the sectarian difference. On this she wrote various poems attacking division and the colonizer, and there are certain poems she keeps for herself. Several Arabic magazines have published collections of her verse, among them the magazines al-Fikr, al-Shams, al-Amani, and al-Uruba.

She obtained no higher diplomas, nor even intermediate ones, and she married at an early age. This did not prevent her from devoting herself constantly to her poetic gift, and she is rightly counted among the poetesses who are regarded with esteem and reverence. She wrote the introduction to the diwan of her brother, the poet Badawi al-Jabal, and she succeeded in that introduction even though, in the field of poetry, she stood as an opposing front to her brother al-Badawi.

You came into existence a page of purity, not knowing what weariness it holds,
and a mother received you into your life, dutiful morning and evening,
who savors sickness so that you may be well, and suffers, rejoicing in her suffering.
A laugh from her upon your sweet mouth — from it my comfort is drawn, and from it my reward;
and a beam I glimpsed between your eyelids dispels the shadows of darkness;
and a smile from your lips, all purity, makes sport of sorrows and calamities.
You send out the call "Mama" and "Papa" — and from you they are the sweetest of names.
You are a gift in this life — and is there in the universe any gift more radiant than the gift of children?
You delight the heart in all you show, in every laugh and every gesture,
and you stir my soul when you sing with the tune of lovely childhood.
Yours are my body, my rest, and my youth — my sickness, my health, and my happiness.

From your existence I have received a lesson the greatest of scholars never gave me,
and I have beheld tenderness as a verdant garden in the mother's heart, fragrant with dew,
and through my own tenderness and love I have come to know the worth of mothers and fathers.