Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

It is however by delving into the Arab literary wisdom that one stumbles on the prophetic manner in which Arab and Muslim poets and philosophers through history have predicted the present situation with precision. One feels as if time has been frozen. I just let these wise men speak:

IRAQ

Singing in Baghdad, the satirical Iraqi poet Al Hassan Ibn Han Abu Nawas, 8th C, said:

Death is ever near us, never far removed.
Everyday brings death's call and the wailing of keening Women...
How long will you frolic and jest in delusion
When every day death glows to the flint of your life?

The Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi (20th C) gives us even grimmer picture:

Deepen the hole, gravedigger,
Deepen it to a depth with no limits
Ranging beyond the orbit of the sun...

The blind poet-philosopher Abu Ala Al Marri, 11th C, captures the current situation of Iraq with surprising precision:

My clothing is my shroud, my grave is my home; my life is my fate,
And for me death is resurrection.

But amid the stench of death and gloom, the Iraqi poet and pioneer of modern Arabic poetry Badr Shakir Al Sayyab, 20thC, breathes hope into his people

In every raindrop
A red or yellow flower-bud.
Each tear of hungry and naked people,
Each drop spilled from the blood of slaves,
Each is a smile awaiting new lips,
A teat rosy on a babe's mouth
In tomorrow's youthful world, giver of life,
Rain, rain, rain
Iraq will blossom with rain.

LEBANON

On Lebanon it is non other than the writer of the Prophet, Gibran Kahlil Gibran, 20th C, who gives us the real picture of his country's eternal problem:

"...Your Lebanon is a political dilemma
That the days are trying to resolve,
But my Lebanon is hills, rising with
Reverence and majesty towards
The blueness of the sky."

PALESTINE

In Palestine, the distinguished woman poet Fadwa Touqan, who died in 2003, expressed her people's perpetual fear of the long journey but also of the unknown tomorrow:

I'm afraid of tomorrow
I'm afraid of the unknowable resources of fate
O God, don't let me be a burden, shunned by young and old
I wait to arrive where the land is silent, I'm waiting for death
Long has been my journey O God
Make the path short and the journey end.

It is, however, Palestine's most celebrated poet Mahmud Darwish, who reminds us of the Palestinian's people's defiance and pride in their Arab identity and their love for life:

Write it down!
I'm Arab,
And my card number is fifty thousand;
I have eight children
And the ninth...is due late summer.
Does that annoy you?

ISRAEL

To talk about the poetry of misery in the Middle East and leave out Israel's celebrated poet would be like drawing an incomplete circle. In the following lines Yehuda Amichai, 20th C, envisions death everywhere:

Is all of this
sorrow? I don't know.
I stood in the cemetery dressed in
the camouflage clothes of a living man: brown pants
and a shirt yellow as the sun.
Cemeteries are cheap; they don't ask for much.
Even the wastebaskets are small, made for holding
tissue paper
that wrapped flowers from the store.

SUDAN

One cannot find a darker picture in today's Darfur than that portrayed by the Africanist poet of Sudan Mohammed Al Fayturi:

When darkness erects
Over city streets
Barriers of black stone,
People extend their hands
To the morrow's balconies...
Their days are ancient memories
Of an ancient land,
Their faces, like their hands, gloomy...
You might think they are submissive,
But actually they are on fire!

SOMALIA:

In Somalia, I will borrow one a few old anonymous lines from the land of Bards:

"The grief cry bursts from every lip
Fear sits on every brow,
There's blood upon the courser's flank!
Blood on the saddle bow!

My favorite Proverb:
Amid this apocalyptic scenario, following is my favorite Arab proverb for the American Administration: "Whoever gets between the onion and its skin will only be rewarded by its stink."