Penelope Wires (أسلاك بينيلوبي)

By Ameer Hamad (tr. Hoda Ali)

The barbed wire on the border

Is woven by a mother’s needle

Her son, lost in another war, returned

As a skeleton

He carries the barrels to the helicopters

And whenever a raid ends

New mothers wove their yarn . . .

That the air became a metal dome

Over a country

This tank stares at it

With an eye whose smoke is dozing.