Poem of the Week | October 23, 2012
Ruth Awad: "Sūrat al-Qiyāma: My Father Talks to God When Syria Invades Tripoli, 1976"
This week we’re featuring a new poem by Ruth Awad. Awad holds an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Republic, Anti-, Copper Nickel, RHINO, and elsewhere. She loves her two Pomeranians very much.
Author’s Note:
This poem seemed the most cohesive way into one of my father’s most harrowing experiences during the Lebanese Civil War, and how daily life mutates in that violent static. My aim was to form a composite impression of the spiritual ramifications of war as experienced by my father when growing up in Tripoli during this time. The aftermath of the war haunts these places still, and in my father’s case, the same is true. Even after he left Lebanon, it seemed that dissonance and grief followed him.
Sūrat al-Qiyāma:
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