Today Wails and That Night

Yemeni mp

Ahmed Saif Hashed

Live your life and do not waste your chances on illusions. Know that the opportunities of death, patient and ever-lurking, are far greater. Listen to the one who said, “Death nips at my ear and whispers, live your life, for I am coming.” Do not let false prohibitions steal your rights, strangle your neck, bury you alive in your own modesty, and heap upon you the weight of dullness and legions of laziness, convincing you that falsehood is truth.

Question certainties until you are sure, and then question them again until you are surer still. How many certainties stood like mountains in our consciousness, only for time to reveal them as lies draped in deceit, celebrated by the crowd, until their falsehood became evident?

Turn over every certainty. Test it, examine it in the lab, try it ten times, study it, repeat, reevaluate, and note what changes. Understand that knowledge and methodology will never fail a sincere seeker. Investigate the fixed truths. Seek what contradicts them, what confirms them, or what might mend their crookedness. Do not overlook knowledge that could illuminate the path to the future you seek.

Life is too short, and youth is even shorter, fleeting like the blink of an eye. Do not squander it in aimlessness or imprison it in the dungeons of false prohibitions, lest you regret a life lost and a youth that leaves nothing but remorse and sorrow. Seek hidden beauty or abundance within it to face the ugliness of the world. Rejoice to live your days fully and confront the many days stamped with sorrow and deeper regret.

In Qala’stan, we held feasts for love, with lightning and thunder and rain pouring down. The breezes of the universe swayed, danced with delight, and rejoiced in their movement. We were drenched in clouds and intoxicated with rapture, our senses perfumed with the scent of wet earth. Streams flowed, nourishing the parched land and barren plains, filling thirsty valleys with life. The arid became green. Flowers and blossoms bloomed in a rainbow of colors, and what was once dry and barren turned to grass and carpets of life.

Yet slanderers and whisperers encircled us. We lived under siege. They monitored the rhythm of our breaths and the heartbeat of our passions. Ears could hear the crawling of ants. Walls had ears, stealing sounds from afar, while eyes observed the breaths of night lovers. Temple guards cared for nothing but capturing whispers of love, the steps of the night, and the burning longing of lovers.

Snitching found walls, ears, and eyes. They spied and listened from behind doors, peered through cracks, through the doors of our secret chambers, laying traps and waiting for the moment to catch a misstep. They peered through our windows, stained with passion, exploring our fears, hidden places, and the innermost stirrings of the poet. They searched the mind of the passionate lover for irrefutable proof while the lover drowned in the glorification of God.

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Feeling the suffocating pressure and injustice, we decided to break the chains and liberate love bound and shackled. We released our hooked hands and opened them to the rain and embraces. We freed love from the dungeons of darkness, from prison cellars buried deep underground, sending it into the vast expanses of the universe.

Love began to gamble and to risk itself in the battles of life. The victory that nearly escaped us, we returned to our embrace. The defeat that almost overwhelmed us, we broke its spine and took from it what seemed unseizable. We sang until love itself was intoxicated while the present moon danced joyfully to the rhythms of the dan.

And let the envious see. 

We met, and the moon bore witness.

 My beloved came as promised,

 fulfilling his vow in love.

 Oh, my fortune, oh, my bliss.

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On that night, New Year’s Eve, our alley celebrated with us the arrival of the year. It swirled around our waists until we grew dizzy from the dance, intoxicated by the wine of love melting in the dominion of the Lord. We spun together until smoke enveloped us, and in six days, we created worlds. A joyful promise was delivered, heralding the generosity of the coming year. Love, wine, pleasures, and a love grander and deeper than anything we had ever known.

Today, Aden is held captive to the ears. The south is blinded in its gaze with a broken heart. Axes, knives, and calamities devour the limbs of the beloved like predators and hyenas. The future plunges into the unknown. Fragile dreams lie buried under mountains of sorrow and gloom.

From Al-Mualla to Nashton, pain writhes and moans. Aden is the port without a harbor, the sea stripped of its pillars, the sky without seagulls, and the seagulls without wings. The cliffs are scoured by death. A homeland plundered from start to finish. The south drinks its own salt, feeds on its wounds, groans its sighs, belches pain, and exhales despair. Impoverished to the core and drowning in grief, with tides lost in the unseen, the south tears itself apart under neglect and exploitation.

Sana’a’s windows are pierced like eyes. The city is abandoned, full of ruins, desolation, and loss. The wings of caged birds flutter in iron prisons. The breaths of death occupy spaces meant for release. The vibrant squares of love are empty, deprived of romance and the embrace once cherished under priestly care.

Sana’a is withered, bleeding, utterly exhausted, starving, suffocating in blood, draped in mourning writ large. Death, lavish and imposing, blesses it with a Hijri birth and seals it with chains from the first covenant. Sana’a lives in a bygone era under a reign that reaches back over a thousand years.

South and north weep for a homeland slipping through our fingers, a homeland reduced to fragments, shards, and bitter harvest. Foreheads of pride now kneel, bleeding the pus of humiliation. Children and flowers vanished amidst the timber of war.

A crushed people, their sustenance stolen, a people starving and dying of famine. Wealth plundered, and a population cursed by hunger. No tides, no sea, no dignity, nothing of what was promised. We live hungry as if under the first era of slavery, forced into labor. Yesterday’s Yemen has vanished, and tomorrow drifts away. Yemen today is nothing but brothels and back gardens where anyone can defile it. Playful death reigns and destruction follows destruction.

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