Greetings, Life and Other Poems

By Malak Kalmoni Chehab

Greetings, Life

What have you seen?
How have you been?
Has time, in its transience, kept you keen?

Have you asked it its reason for being?
Have you asked destiny why it's fleeing?
Have you asked faith why it’s redeeming?

Life, I wish you could respond,
My questions are many and correspond
To all that happens that only seems morbid.

News and social media, all expound on
All that is negative: violence, death, con,
Racism, segregation, depravity, and poison.

All that pessimism holds no importance
To our health and emotional stability, whose impotence
Vis a Vis a world that's dominated by impudence.

Alter, change, deviate from all that's the same,
Be 'you', unique, strong, and don't play their game,
Play yours, turn it into a burning flame.

Wailing Death

Bombing!
Shelling!
Rat a tat of gun shooting!
Exploding!
Screaming!
Sirens wailing!
Who's listening?
How many must die to get a hearing?

Run, jump, scream your fear
As detonations and mushroom clouds bare
A cover for the death and violence that tear
At your humanity that's unfair!

Broken homes, shards and shrapnel,
Ruination of social order, only enthrall
The onlooker with devastation of the hovel,
That ensconced elderly, adults, and kids who spell
Their fear in tears from hell!

Child’s Eyes

Look, look into the eyes of a dirty child,
The window to hell peaks out instead.

Look, look into the kid's shy demeanor
That shows he's older than his seventh year.

He walks, cautiously, looking around, guardedly
For another back hand to the face, that's lovely.

Look, as he flees swiftly from aggression
As a repeat is all he knows in his vision.

Look, look at his shredded clothing,
Ratty and spotty just like his living.

Look, the shimmer of tears that are hovering,
Always expecting another blow that's coming!

Look, no one's the wiser,
Look, the guardian is the destroyer.

Look not at the cover,
But at the heart that needs a helper.

Blind Memory

I swing around
My gazes abound
And stall. Frozen on the ground
By the footsteps that are never found.

Each step was an adventure, gone
And never seen, but remembered as one
Whose stature is alone in memory and stone.
Adoration of all that's futile and long gone,

For your recall is colored by a grapevine
Of emotions that are supple
And unmanageable.

Let it go!
Move on, throw 
Caution to the wind, and blow
Away boundaries that limit your flow!

Ode to Indigenous Victims

Who are our greatest victims?
Our native women’s rapes?

Over half a century ago,
Their children were of age to

Be abused and killed
Then buried and abandoned.

Abandoned but unforgetting
As parents went unknowing
Of their fates and kept hoping …

Their faith in governments
That oppressed them and forsakes

Their loved one’s destinies
That are only excavated on pleas …

And demands for knowledge
Of their kismet to be able to judge,

Whether to move on, or …
Stay in Limbo’s nescience for

Their needs are trivialized,
While others’ are optimized…

What’s needed to achieve equality
In attaining justice for all humanity
And not only a minority?

Malak Kalmoni Chehab’s poetry is a reflection of himself and the society he has lived in in the past (Ghana, Lebanon), and where he lives now, Canada. Chebab’s aim is to present his unique perspective and empower others to believe in ‘who’ they are.