By: Zac Warden
Malak Kalmoni. Chehab powerful poem Malak, Hard hitting and rightly so! This is a well crafted poem but probably quite difficult to verbalise aloud… it has few obvious breaks or pauses between stanzas and complex word use… The only way I think this could be adequately delivered is then hard and fast, within righteous anger, an emotional outpouring of angst? Or very slowly in a resigned,defeated tempo… mid way would stumble… and it is too good a poem with too important a message to stumble…. I’m interested in your thoughts?
Thank you for the honor and your hard work. This was a spoken poem that’s difficult to render, but I’ll do my best.
We Did Everything
We did all we could …
Yet, genocide is as deadly as beheading,
Death is as real as your breathing,
Living is as traumatic as a horrifying cloud.
We did all we could …
But child amputees are running marathons
To survive but another day as pawns
Of politics that’s gross as it hammered
That “We did all we could”, clause
That left pregnant mothers to die,
Elderly to fry in fire’s explosive dye,
Fathers to be scattered in pieces in cruel cries
That “We did all we could”, was
Said to assuage politicians’ conscious
While knowing their endeavors were shackled in pious
Prison, whose doctrine permits rapes,
Whose haze in, “We did all we could”,
Evaporates in the fog of time that flies
Without scheduling its prime in trauma that cries
Out to be understood, yet, their voices loud
And proud in the hopeful quagmire of guilt
Of surviving, whole or not, presses
In the abyss of despair where hopeless
Orphaned, erased families, press to built.
©️Malak kalmoni chehab ©️
My poetry book, Perfectly Flawed poetry for change, is available on all eplatforms including Amazon. It was on the finalist list for the Canadian Book Club Awards 2023.
https://www.amazon.ca/Perfectly-Flawed-poetry-Malak-Kalmoni/dp/1525582518
Poetry for Change 