Ibrahim El-Salahi

His sweet memory flew like a breeze on the dusty face of the heat.

The soldiers came, broke the cell’s door.

With their cannon, they split open my chest in a horizontal line.

My blood sprinkled in every direction and every horizon.

They dragged my body through volcanic doors,

My shroud was white, red, white, red, white.

They took my body westward to the foreigners’ cemetery.

At sunset, they buried me in the foreigners’ earth.

My blood boiled up; I jumped, painlessly, in my grave.

The soldiers poured more earth,

Fought with cannons and machine guns.

My blood was unfaltering.

Over the river, at the bridge, my blood penetrated the soldiers’ lines.

It darted toward the cannon, toward the palace, through the cannon.

It rose from bare feet to the top.

In my blood, tyranny drowned.

As in my grave, I painlessly watched.

Ibrahim El-Salahi: This is what used to worry me enormously. These kinds of images of torture, of death, of blood, of earth, of being buried, of not being resurrected but getting out and moving, to fight as if my blood was going to take revenge on them.