My Apologies

Ammiel Alcalay

    ^{after Bulund al-Haidari}

To the hostages of our policies, my apologies—
the petty stenographers of the crooked rulers
in the once fancy now crumbling cities
of our fading Empire lied then.
They lied then and they lie now.
Everything they say and write is a lie,
about law and freedom, about equality
and justice, in the rubble of the bombs
we make and sell, in the silent cries
of limbless orphans, in the night
lit by white phosphorous and the
relentless sound of buzzing drones.
They tell us we used to have things of
value, even things we ourselves made,
and that it was a place like no other.
All I know is that Sinbad once sailed
to Gaza and so to Gaza he’ll sail once again.

Copyright © 2024 by Ammiel Alcalay. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on Decmber 6, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“I first encountered Bulund al-Haidari’s poem in Modern Poetry of the Arab World, an anthology edited and translated by Abdullah al-Udhari, and it is a poem I go back to again and again. I once met al-Haidari at a memorial for Naji al-Ali, the Palestinian artist who was assassinated in London in 1987. I had heard a lot about al-Haidari from a friend, Nissim Rejwan, who grew up in Baghdad and managed a bookshop that al-Haidari frequented in the 1940s. All of this came together in an effort to express my thoughts about the ongoing genocide in Gaza and Palestine.”
—Ammiel Alcalay

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