Ruth Awad
Ruth Awad is a Lebanese-American poet, a 2021 NEA Poetry fellow, and the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2018 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. Alongside Rachel Mennies, she is the co-editor of The Familiar Wild: On Dogs and Poetry (Sundress Publications, 2020). She is the recipient of a 2020 and 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she won the 2013 and 2012 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry Contest. Her work appears in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Believer, The New Republic, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She has an MFA in poetry from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and she lives and writes in Columbus, Ohio. Source
A Message from the Guardians of the Cedars
“It is the duty of each Lebanese to kill one Palestinian.”
–Slogan used by the ultranationalist anti-Palestinian militia, known for
their cruelty and war crimes during the Lebanese Civil War
Lebanon, you are not Arab.
And those Palestinians
gnawing your heel bone
are not your sons.
Their teeth spark up at you.
Karantina and Tel al-Zaatar—
every flame scrolled over
those camps was a love letter.
Lebanon, does your love not burn?
Drive to Jounieh,
your tires gurge. An overpass
like a balaclava’s cut eyes.
Parched riverbeds sated
with the strange pulp untethered
from our rusted cab.
Lebanon, can you hear them
bleating, bound to the back of the taxi
and dragged up to the motorway?
We are writing your anthem:
the cursive of blood, all
the road singing
a fading heartbeat.
Listen. The body, a pure, shapeless mass
like red clay. Build yourself from it.
Published:
2017
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2023
Themes:
Agency
Identity
Intersectionality & Culture
Politics
Violence & War
Literary Devices:
Imagery
visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work
Metaphor
a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic
Personification
the attribution of human qualities to a non-human thing
Sensory Detail
words used to invoke the five senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell)
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”