Dubai-based Lebanese poet Zeina Hashem Beck, whose book To Live in Autumn by Backwaters Press will be launched in Dubai today, shares one of her peoms about Beirut from the collection
The Old Building
Floor I
Water could not reach higher
than the first floor those days,
(that is what I recall)
so we spent our mornings going up
and down, up and down
to the first floor,
with buckets in our hands.
Mama sometimes sang and said
she had a great voice
and could’ve been a star.
I climbed and thought her voice
lifted the heat for a while,
resembled the water in our hands,
reflected the color of her eyes—
blue, inevitable, clear,
as I plunged into it and sang.
The stairs were more crowded
than the streets,
as if life were transferred
to that vertical world with yellow walls,
and permeated the small bullet holes.
Floor IV
I don’t remember anyone’s
name, except for the oldest son Yasseen,
whose madness imposed itself on us,
whom we found from time to time,
unconscious on the night stairs,
like a garbage bag at our feet.
Floor V
Umm Jamal’s laughter trembled,
settled in the fat around her waist.
As I ate she insisted
that I eat everything with bread,
told me her granddaughter
loved ketchup too.
One day she dusted her photo frames,
arranged them in sunlit angles,
braided her long winter hair in a bun,
pinned it to the back of her head
and stopped aging.
Floor VII
Raymond lived with his mother
who went sideways down the stairs,
click, click, slowly, click,
(they say the war disturbs your walk).
Sometimes he sang in the shower
“Hiroshima, Hiroshima,
boom boom boom,
boom boom boom,”
until the ambulance flickered in the dark
like an ominous red star.
One day on the stairs,
time decided to
stop, cut itself in two,
let Raymond descend
from his room on the seventh.
I looked and told myself,
“Do not fear poor Raymond,
poor Raymond, he’s so calm.”
Floor IX
Ammo Jawad couldn’t part
with the city, and its cafés, its streets.
On nights when the heat
grabbed you by the throat,
he slept on the balcony, smoked cigars,
wrote to his family in Dallas,
scribbled Arabic poetry across the sky
and dreamt
of the ’60s, of fields of wild thyme
and a cold light breeze.
Floor VI
The beautiful mother with blue eyes
shouted to the grocery store
from the balcony every other day,
I can still hear her say,
“Tomatoes, rice, tissues, and
Always, Always,
the thin ones please.”
The father smoked Gitanes and
politics, wanted to change his car,
wanted to change his life.
He sang me to sleep every night,
planted my name
among olives and jasmine trees.
The little girl with crooked teeth
biked on the balcony with her brother,
remembers nothing of the civil war,
except a man singing to Hiroshima,
buckets filled with water, stairs,
and a little candle in the corridor
lit so she won’t be afraid of the dark.
Published in To Live in Autumn (The Backwaters Press, 2014)
aahmed@thenational.ae
TO A LAND UNKNOWN
Director: Mahdi Fleifel
Starring: Mahmoud Bakri, Aram Sabbah, Mohammad Alsurafa
Rating: 4.5/5
Tuesday's fixtures
Kyrgyzstan v Qatar, 5.45pm
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
Red Sparrow
Dir: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Egerton, Charlotte Rampling, Jeremy Irons
Three stars
PREMIER LEAGUE FIXTURES
Tuesday (UAE kick-off times)
Leicester City v Brighton (9pm)
Tottenham Hotspur v West Ham United (11.15pm)
Wednesday
Manchester United v Sheffield United (9pm)
Newcastle United v Aston Villa (9pm)
Norwich City v Everton (9pm)
Wolves v Bournemouth (9pm)
Liverpool v Crystal Palace (11.15pm)
Thursday
Burnley v Watford (9pm)
Southampton v Arsenal (9pm)
Chelsea v Manchester City (11.15pm)
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In numbers: PKK’s money network in Europe
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Captain Marvel
Director: Anna Boden, Ryan Fleck
Starring: Brie Larson, Samuel L Jackson, Jude Law, Ben Mendelsohn
4/5 stars
Biog
Mr Kandhari is legally authorised to conduct marriages in the gurdwara
He has officiated weddings of Sikhs and people of different faiths from Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Russia, the US and Canada
Father of two sons, grandfather of six
Plays golf once a week
Enjoys trying new holiday destinations with his wife and family
Walks for an hour every morning
Completed a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Loyola College, Chennai, India
2019 is a milestone because he completes 50 years in business
The rules on fostering in the UAE
A foster couple or family must:
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