Canvas To Delirium
An Account of the First Three Years
of the Lebanese Civil War
A Boyhood Remembrance
in Fourteen Passages
(2023)
1 .
The origin story of this canvas
Painted in an onyx haze
Filmed shadow velvet
At the peak of sun’s death
The peak lowest point of a setting province
Late day seeping twilight
When human chameleons are at their weakest
Sandy aura umber tones
Give way to charcoal black sap
A lull between the next war and the last.
2 .
Echoes of boyhood's national calamities
Farmhouse family room hushed for naps
Mandarin-olive-ochre psychedelic swirled sofas
Under missile blast
Womb cushions endure dry mud ceiling collapse
Exposing poor sponge and metal-spring entrails.
3 .
In the year nineteen handir and sequøndüry tuwree
In the year mille nœüf cent and sôixante-seized
For three years time stopped
The fluff of '70 to '75
Eclipsed by the '73 to '78 blast.
4 .
Disco bridegrooms escaped with their last breath
Long polyester lapel spreads
Cramped wrinkled under Kalashnikov sling straps
Makeshift rifles for immediate defense
Suddnely stacked and grabbed
The coming delirium of war’s most popular front fictions
Factions for liberation spawned legends.
5 .
Brandishing claws through southbound shadow fleeings
Refuge runnings for a week
Pleading dialed-up shelter borrowings
Three dozen squat-huddled
Under tenement stairs, trapped
Children squeezed, mothers whimpering
Or voiceless gasps
Fathers peek out, scampering for food or passageways
Two lost and three remaining.
6 .
Three springs in three villages,
and a girl’s wildflower hill delights
Three missed school years,
and a boy’s maximalist euphoric frights
Surrogate village classrooms
Discipline teachings
Slap-dashed and patched
Farm boys riding plows and farm men raising flags.
7 .
Great aunts you reckon you must’ve met
Genteel white chiffon mandeels
Laid casually on genteel black chiffon slender-bone shoulders
Patent black leather reflective snapped purses, Like pliant pyramids, sitting prudently in laps
Sparkling black eyes, bundled in earthy cheekbones, wondering silently
What hell will next pass.
8 .
Mid-century's postcolonial newly middle-classed hopefuls, dashed
Sudanese theorists and Palestinian poets
Egyptian architects and Syrian machinists
Yemeni engineers and Algerian ceramists
Lebanese teachers and Iraqi chemists
Tunisian journalists and Libyan nurses
Disintegrated altogether into the cauldron bog of Kissinger’s remix simmerings.
9 .
All the while families in fright flee from the last clash
To the nearest village still with roofs
To shelter their desperate backs
Encountering new strangers, some familiar to the eyes, and unfamiliar
Eyes look into eyes, uneasy soft speech to crack fearful masks
Negotiating rice rations, rumors, pots, sleeping rooms, doors, and outdoor water taps
Obliged houses
Repurposed for multitudes
And for cherished torn maps.
10 .
No thoughts of tomorrow, the world shrunken to now, and trapped
Village duck ponds, tucked between shadow trees, cooling breeze
Lush leafy hideaways for migrant children's bashful meetups
Rhymed jump games on dusty sprinkled pebble paths
مَنديـلــِك ِ مْنَـيَّل مَنديلـي بــلا نيلـي
11 .
Atlantis wind direction
Iron oxen onslaught
Newly-spirited sea-myth hordes
Venomous asps
Terrible pterodactyl trespass
War-room board-droom
Multi-pronged catapults
Lightning blitz
Murmurings, salivations
Lustful declarations, lip-smacked
Red hands on desks, hard-slapped.
12 .
Beirut to Detroit flash-voyage would turn the page away from all that
Mothers and fathers in airport lines, panicked and dragged
Counted desperations, hastily tied and packed
Airport policeman shouting hysterics, unaware of his own torn or lost visor strap
Conducting trails of people, evacuated from exploded lands.
13 .
Children freely playing between adult legs and airport barricade racks
Aluminum gaps just wide enough for a small boy to swing under and vanish in a flash
Sneak and run back
To a grandmother's white rosebush and sage garden
But no such courage for a tiny subordinate boy, complying with his adament distressed shell-shocked dad.
14 .
Global supernovel posited us into a shaft of hurt delirium
Dropped from the sky, into an orange leafy Michigan sidewalk evening rain
Begin again, in a refuge cedar basement with eight beds
Uncles and aunts and cousins and found kin
One large kettle to feed a village tribe, transplanted to drift
To this day undying, searching for our unspoken breath
Hovering in sunbeams, destined to refract.