Kareem Abdulsalam: Teargas Poems

[With the smoke of the Egyptian uprising still hanging in the air, Kareem Abdulsalam recently published his ninth diwan, Teargas Cannisters (Qanabil musila li-l-dumu', Cairo: Dar al-Kitaba al-Ukhra, March 2011). Abdulsalam's poetry captures the elation of a revolution half started and the dread of waking too suddenly from a dream.] 

1. Where have they Hidden Themselves?

Those who fired rubber bullets at eyes
Those snipers who aimed 12 mm. slugs
      At heads and hearts
The drivers who tried to run over revolutionaries
     With their armored cars
All of them have vanished.

They’ve hidden themselves somewhere
     While those they killed
          Remain as dead as they were
     While those whom they injured
          Remain as wounded as ever
     While hypocrites now lend their support to the Revolution.

Those murderers, those hypocrites,
     Where have they hidden themselves?

2. The King Is Furious

If the King were alive
     Heads would roll
     Especially the heads of the criminals who defiled his sacred presence

If Tutankhamen were here right now
     He would order the soldiers stationed at the National Museum
          To be bound in chains.
     He’d order their heads shaved
     He’d order them paraded around the country on the backs of lame donkeys
     So that the people could jeer at them.

Those who exploited the storm of revolution
To steal inside, to vandalize his glorious statue
And to wreak havoc in his sanctum…

If King Tutankhamen were among us
     He would push the traitors into the river Nile
          To die a watery death.
     He would cut off their hands and feet as punishment
     And record these images on the walls of his temple.

3. Dictator, Which Do You Prefer?

Which of these do you prefer, Dictator:
To resign, or to burn down the entire country?

My son, fire separates the good from the evil
Fire is what makes precious metals pure.

Which, O Dictator, do you prefer:
To step aside, or to unleash a civil war?

My son, call it a People’s Olympics,
And know that it is the best who is left standing,
In the finals, you can clearly recognize the strong and pure.
Does anyone ever know who the winner is before the games begin?

Dictator, which do you prefer:
To go or to starve your people?

My son, go starve yourselves and then wake up.
There is so much flab in your bodies—what are you going to do with it?

4. What Comes From a Cop

Armored cars
Boxes of perfected fear.
     We looked at them and saw divine creatures come to crush us
     Just as native Americans first looked at horses.
     We thought death itself sprang from them.

Armored car
Went up in flames
    And the policeman inside struggled against the tongues of fire
    Fought against fear.

When we rescued him,
He joined the rebellion.
 

5. He Thought We Were Going to Kill Him

Central security policeman
Peasant who came straight from the village
To fire tear gas at revolutionaries.
When we grabbed him,
He thought we were going to kill him
And cried like a child,
     I want my brother. He’s over there
     In that burning armored car.

We took him by the hand
     To his brother—the very one from the last poem.
He’d taken off his black vest,
     And was sitting on the ground with the revolutionaries.

6. What Is to Be Done, Now?

What shall we do, now that freedom has dawned over Midan Tahrir?

It would be senseless to go back home,
     To tell tales of the many victories won by the people.
We will tell the stories often,
     And listeners will ask us and ask us to repeat them.

In our hearts we might wish that the Dictator had persisted in his stubbornness
     that we had remained in Midan Tahrir forever…
          churning out hurried placards and posters
               sharing food with one another
                    sharing slogans of freedom.

We desire, each one of us, to go on talking about ourselves without end.
     We dream of sitting,
          all of us together,
               on the ground,
                    singing ballads about our country
                         on cold nights
                              while the tanks protect us.