In poor Beirut, spatchcocked and
And fated on a faultline
To the Omphalos,
The keystone to the madness of too many crowds;
Broken, seemingly, on concentric, counter-spinning wheels -
Of God, sects, avarice, theft, revenge and power -
And this time half-Hiroshima’d by cutting corners,
Half-arsed “this’ll dos”,
The next last step to
Who cares less, itself a weary stumble
Before let’s not even bother breathing,
I once saw, nonetheless, three different metaphors
Of Towering Hope in tiny, random things.
For if you walked, like I did,
Along the Corniche in September,
Around lunchtime, walking westward,
To your right, beyond the railing, between Corniche
And the steaming sea, on the jagged rusty rocks
Sat burqua’d loreleis, knees mermaiding on thin, bright towels,
Picnicking as their thin-limbed laughing children
Leaped screaming, splayed like lemurs, to evade the spikes of vulcanite
And splashed into the sea.
Meanwhile, to your left, once you
Looked away from simple human love,
The seafront’s battlemented by vast apartment blocks
Designed to block and then monopolise
Beirutis’ vista of that brindled sea still
Stretching out to Sheba
Which quinqueremes once crosshatched,
Classically globalising
Cedar, dates and sandalwood, the previous iteration
Of the luxury goods, the Louis Vuitton tribute
Now encumbering the last elites, now
Penthoused in these Dubai watchtower stacks.
In consequence, a walk along the Corniche
Got turned into slow motion strobing, a lethargic
Kind of crowd control to bring on nausea and disorientation
As the flats eclipsed the humid sun
And every twenty steps, for twenty more you
Passed from dazzling glare to moneyed twilight, and
Shuddered slightly at the sudden cold.
Except, of course, that this is a
False Dusk.
The bullet holes still peppering the Lido’s changing rooms,
The wreckage, as I write, still smoking
From the docks, the Stalingrad they wrought
On the urban battlefield along the Green Line, (by then
Rebuilt as high end retail to lure in rich thugs
From The Gulf), the hatreds of Millennia
Hosed with geopolitics and petrodollars,
The Playground of the Med poleaxed
Into an amphitheatre for unquenchable confessional hegemonies,
Each ratchet down,
The turn of every screw,
Every floating final straw,
Nonetheless, is still really
A False Dusk.
The pavement’s
Glowing up ahead,
Even though you clearly see
The Stygian shadows stretch again
Shortly beyond,
Before the False Dusk
Fades away once more to
Laughing sunshine.
And six months after I’d escaped
The Corniche’s False Dusks,
On my next trip I saw perhaps
The most purely joyous thing I’ve ever seen.
In the hipster bar off Hamra on the westward
Drag to Hezbollah’s desmesne, run by
By the Commie Saudi, I watched young Arab
Comic book creators dance,
Swaying their arms that Arab way,
Like golden fronds of seaweed floating up
From some Phoenician shipwreck; dance
To other Arab comics artists performing
The Clash’s “Rock The Casbah”
In Arabic. My heart still sings with joy.
And while the dusks, in all their darkness, won’t ever stop falling
Dawns, you’ll find, have kept on coming up.