quotes of books louis yako
Louis Yako
Description not available.
I dedicate these poems to all the people who were prematurely cut from their times and places. To each human soul that wilted and lost its fragrance in exile.
NoorBook
They say: there is time for love and time for death...
I say: we don't realize it's time for love
Until it is almost time to die...
Under this pine tree I let you down and you let me down. Under this tree, you betrayed me and I betrayed you. Right here, I forgot you and you forgot me. Under this pine that they call 'evergreen' we both discovered that nothing lasts forever.
Exhaustion
Salima sat in the fancy hotel room
In the evening time.
Here she is again in another foreign city,
Attending a conference discussing “human rights”.
Her eyes roamed the room.
She suddenly felt a severe chill in her body.
She suddenly realized that she is exhausted,
But her exhaustion is not that of one day,
It was one of a lifetime!
It fell upon her abruptly.
The thoughts of the bygone years
Nested in her head,
Were suddenly awoken.
One thought after another.
She realized at that moment
That she is tired of responding to
The same absurd questions
About her origins
Her ethnicity,
Her religion,
Her hobbies,
Her favorite foods,
Her education background,
Her age,
And her occupation.
Questions asked frequently by people who don’t care.
She suddenly realized
That throughout her life,
She never found a friend who could really understand.
The evening was about to draw its dark curtains.
She remembered that ever since she was a child,
She had been hiding her favorite words and writings
In notebooks that nobody will read.
She has been murmuring her favorite tunes,
In places where nobody could hear her.
The evening was about to draw its dark curtains.
She realized that her true thoughts and feelings
Lived nowhere expect inside of her head,
And there they will most likely die.
Her head had become like a prison for her thoughts.
The evening was about to draw its dark curtains.
She suddenly realized
That she had wasted so many years of her life
Looking for someone who might understand.
And each time she thought she had found one,
She found herself in yet another prison.
She looked through the window of the fancy hotel room
And saw that the darkness had covered the entire city.
September 9, 2017
The Problem
The problem I have, my friends, is too complicated.
It is not only that I no longer have a home,
Or a roof over my head.
It is that I no longer wish to have one.
I confess to you; however, that
Even if I wished to have a place to call home,
My wish would be impossible to realize,
Because I have been erased from everywhere.
Yes, the mercenaries
And those who worship the dollar notes,
Under the names of religions and ideologies,
Have erased me from history.
They have revised and rewrote my story.
Everywhere I go,
I find them lurking and waiting for me,
To blockade me,
To suffocate me,
And to steal from my mouth
The few crumbs of bread I have left.
And so, I repeat, my friends,
My problem is too complicated.
I don’t have a home,
I no longer want a home,
And I couldn’t have a home to shelter me,
Even if so I wished in my wild dreams.
June 1, 2017
Photographs from Distant Places
(1)
In distant villages,
You always see the same scenes:
Farms
Cattle
Worship spaces
Small local shops.
Just basic the things humans need
To endure life.
(2)
‘Can you stay with me forever?’
She asked him in the airport,
While hugging him tightly in her arms.
‘Sorry, I can’t. My flight leaves in two hours and a half.’
He responded with an artificially caring voice,
As he kissed her on her right cheek.
(3)
I was walking in one of Bucharest’s old streets,
In a neighborhood that looked harshly beaten
by Time,
And severely damaged by development and globalization.
I saw a poor homeless man
Combing his dirty hair
In a side mirror of a modern and expensive car!
(4)
The shape and the color of the eyes don’t matter.
What matters is that,
As soon as you gaze into them,
You know that they have seen a lot.
All eyes that dare to bear witness
To what they have seen are beautiful.
(5)
A stranger asked me how I chose my path in life.
I told him: ‘I never chose anything, my friend.’
My path has always been like someone forced to sit
In an airplane on a long flight.
Forced to sit with the condition
Of keeping the seatbelt on at all times,
Until the end of the flight.
Here I am still sitting with the seatbelt on.
I can neither move
Nor walk.
I can’t even throw myself
out of the plane’s emergency exit
To end this forced flight!
(6)
After years of searching and observing,
I discovered that despair’s favorite hiding place
Is under business suits and tuxedos.
Under jewelry and expensive night gowns.
Despair dances at the tables where
Expensive wines of corruption
And delicious dinners of betrayal are served.
(7)
Oh, my poet friend,
Did you know that
The bouquet of fresh flowers in that vase
On your table is not a source of inspiration or creativity?
The vase is just a reminder
Of a flower massacre that took place recently
In a field
Where these poor flowers happened to be.
It was their fate to have their already short lives cut shorter,
To wither and wilt in your vase,
While breathing the not-so-fresh air
In your room,
As you sit down at your table
And write your vain words.
(8)
Under authoritarian regimes,
99.9% of the population vote for the dictator.
Under capitalist ‘democratic’ regimes,
99.9% of people love buying and consuming products
Made and sold by the same few corporations.
Awe to those societies where both regimes meet
to create a united vicious alliance against the people!
To create a ‘nation’
Of customers, not citizens!
(9)
The post-revolution leaders are scavengers not hunters.
They master the art of eating up
The dead bodies and achievements
Of the fools who sacrificed themselves
For the ‘revolution’ and its ideals.
Is this the paradox and the irony of all revolutions?
(10)
Every person is ugly if you take a close look at them,
And beautiful, if you take a closer look.
(11)
Just as wheat fields can’t thrive
Under the shadow of other trees,
Intellectuals, too, can’t thrive under the shadow
Of any power or authority.
(12)
We waste so much time trying to change others.
Others waste so much time thinking they are changing.
What a waste!
October 20, 2015
The Cats in the City
Location: an Arab city.
Time: the age of defeat. The twenty-first century.
General atmosphere: “fancy” neighborhoods.
Expensive houses painted in tombstone colors.
Beautiful and well-maintained gardens.
Flowers that no one dares to smell.
Imported cars.
Imported devices.
Imported clothes.
Imported foods.
Endless consumer shops for anything and everything.
Between every other restaurant,
there are shops selling cosmetics and souvenirs.
Between every other consumer market,
There is a worship place.
All consumer shops are built skillfully
On the scab of the same old wound;
A wound that can flood the city with blood and death
With the slightest fingernail scratch.
As I walk farther from the city,
The consumer shops vanish.
The lights are suddenly dimmed.
The cheering and the hustle and bustle of the consumers go silent.
I see myself in total darkness.
I am alone hearing nothing but the sounds of my footsteps,
And the meows of hungry stray street cats,
Covered with the ashes of daily existence.
A thin and hungry cat approaches me,
She meows in despair and starvation,
Begging me for her bite of the day (or the week?)
I throw her a small piece of my sandwich.
She picks it up and runs away
To celebrate her temporary gains!
She leaves me alone wondering in darkness:
What reflects the reality of this city more
The 'fancy' neighborhoods I saw earlier,
Or the starving cats in the darkness?
June 8, 2014
The Meaning of 'Home'
As I travel from one city to another
From one country to another
From one sorrow to another,
I encounter thousands of faces:
In streets, shops, parks, and cafés.
They all ask me the same painful question:
'Where are you from?'
As if they know, I am from a place that lost itself and lost me
On a long, cold, and sad winter night.
They ask me: 'What is your country known for?'
I tell them: 'My country is known for exporting sad stories,
refugees, and displaced people.
All those who were cursed by being born in it.'
Similar questions continue to be asked in cocktail parties,
In hypocritical and mediocre gatherings,
In conferences and boring meetings.
Some pretentiously ask me: 'How do you define "home"?'
I respond with Ghassan Knafani’s words ringing in my ears:
'Home is for all of this not to happen.'
April 19, 2014
The Eternal Friends
The three eternal friends, Time, Loneliness and Death, met at a small old café.
'You won’t last long. I will destroy you at the end,' said Time to Loneliness.
'And I will drain every minute and every second in your life.
Nothing will give you joy no matter what you do or how hard you try,' Loneliness responded.
After a short silence, once Death pronounced its sentence, Loneliness vanished and Time passed.
June 20, 2013
The Vase
The bouquet of flowers in the vase is two weeks old,
Or maybe a little older?
They are all wilted and dead now.
The scene is much like a mass grave,
Each flower has died in its own way.
The first flower—the biggest in the bunch—
Opened as widely as it could.
Each of its petals dried up.
The second one seemed as though it had tried
To bend itself towards the end of her life,
It broke her neck as she dried in silence.
The third flower tried to close after opening,
As she felt her life was coming to an end.
She died closed.
The fourth flower looked like she had started to sacrifice herself
For the sake of everyone else around her.
She, too, dropped most of her petals,
And died naked, except for one or two petals.
The fifth flower didn’t have time to open,
Or perhaps she realized the futility of opening up in such a tight vase.
She also wilted and dried prematurely and half-opened.
The sixth flower died very young,
Before having a chance to bloom.
The colorless water in the vase is now yellowish and dead.
Yes, waters die too.
For colorless waters, death can be colorful.
April 12, 2013
Waiting
She caught herself waiting by her bedroom window.
A window facing a quiet street,
where a car or two passed occasionally.
Otherwise, it was a motionless place.
The tree branches outside danced
Whenever the winds flirted with them.
Although she habitually sat by that window
every day, for years and years,
She never noticed her habit until today!
When she realized that, she felt heart sick and upset.
She didn’t know whether she was angry at herself
Or at the time she had wasted waiting.
What upset her even more
Was that she wasn’t waiting for any person to arrive,
Not even for the postman
Who no longer brought her any personal letters.
She was not waiting for a lover
A friend
Or for parents.
All those she once loved are long gone.
What was she waiting for all these years?
She asked herself this question a thousand times that day,
And she waited for her inner voice to answer.
She must know today!
It suddenly occurred to her that
Since she was a child,
She was waiting for the arrival of a person
Who she could never name or describe.
She could never put a body or a face
On their ambiguous figure.
It was a person who only visited her imagination
In the form of a shadow.
She realized that all her life,
She was yearning for something that she couldn’t name,
And thus, she remained waiting,
Wishing to find out one day
What or who she was waiting for.
February 9, 2013
We must revolt against the malicious and political game of ‘revolution’ as we know it today. According to this game, revolution is nothing but the transfer of pain from one group of people to other less fortunate and wretched groups. According to this political game, ‘revolution’ is merely imposing injustice on new groups of people. According to dirty politicians, ‘revolutions’ are just moving privilege from one elite to another.
