Artist: Fahed Sehab (work made specifically to accompany this poem)

Why does my body tremble
when I am a city born to survive—
a city that never dies,
even if everything collapses but its name?

How do these reddened blemishes on my face
turn into testaments of life,
not maps of extinction?

Why do I wake up terrified at midnight
while the world dreams on,
as if I were an exile
inhabited by darkness?

Why do I fear the sound of rain
when it whispers on windowpanes,
as if every drop were a barrel,
its explosion merely postponed?

Why do I hide
even though I live in a city
that has never seen a barrel bomb,
never heard its buzz—
yet I carry it in my memory
like a pulse that never quiets?

Why does my pen tremble
as I answer an exam,
as if the page were a battlefield,
the question, a shell?

Why do I stare at faces around me
as though they were mirrors of the departed,
shadows of the ones who vanished?

So drenched in disappointment,
I’ve mastered the art of likening faces
to names nearly erased from memory,
had I not survived by accident…
and maybe I won’t again.

How do paved roads
turn into rows of tents—
and when I ask, What
are you doing there?
They say: camping?

How do food lines shift
from waiting for mashawi and koshary
to hunger howling
from the throat of a wounded child
lying on a blanket?

How do the sick at the doors
become the wounded,
awaiting death as if it were an appointment
never delayed?

How do bodies lie so still
that death begins to seem
like a tedious repetition?

Why is all this in my head?

Why do I die every morning
as if I wake only to be buried?

Why? Why? Why?

Why all this death in a city
where the old only die
choked by their cigarette smoke,
ignoring doctors’ warnings,
and the young die only by coincidence—
as if they were breathing omens?

Artist: Fahed Sehab (work made specifically to accompany this poem)