In prison,
poets chronicle the dreams,
poets are hope for ever prisoner
Whenever pain finds them,
revelation begins to write itself down.
Their poems open with an accounting of blame
for the ruler's humiliation of the ruled.
A single line of verse can hold weight

Enough to color the eyes of owls,
a verse can contain a whole day in a single minute,
a verse can write a lifetime in a single day.
And I had, there, among the cells,
a poet, a companion,
a fellow traveler on the narrow path of hardship,
a cellmate with a long dream, and a road ahead
He taught me how to stay up all night,
he dissolved the night in with the ground coffee,

It was clear, from the stories he told,
that his old songs carried sorrow,
that his love for his country lived on inside him,
to a country that stole his youth in the span of a few months.
Prisons are spacious—
even if you were known there for your poetry,
you could recite verses of truth to the very jailers,
and it would strike them with a kind of rapture;
every jailer would come to believe in you,
once the bribe had passed hands.
He was a poet,
still going, with his poem, into the evening meal.

He slept and woke up with verse
He woke up with verse and then slept—
suffering through every language of a sigh,
learning every attribute of God,
believing that the revolution will live,
that no matter how lost his homeland will find him.
When the flame of a relovution ignited, he rose to the challenge
Then was imprisoned. They turned his dream, a nightmare
how could a prison be a prison at all,
if there wasn't a poet locked inside it?
His ink alone could teach generations yet to come
generations that will bow their heads in shame,

he could teach
the shame of chains,
the riddle of the trap,
the very origin of the game.
We lived our hardest days there—
Egypt's narrowest prison is still so vast,
a lifetime of confinement could convince

even the wind
that its wing no longer knows how to fly.
The light itself is a prisoner within those walls.
Every step you take is by the informant's command—
you eat, you drink, you laugh, you doze,
only as his lordship permits.
God said—
I mean, the officer said—
if you wish to pray,
the informant himself must serve as your imam.
And when you sleep?

The informant monitors your dreams.
My friend the poet—
I saw meanings hidden deep within his lines,
every story of the prisoners,
every year of the jailer's cruelty,
sickness and dreams,
humiliation and injustice.

And on a night lit in the heart of winter,
the ruler dreamed of stripping us of warmth, of blankets—
but we found out, through a pack of tobacco.

When inspection is expected
As long as bribery thrives in Egypt,
Egypt will go on thriving, and living.
Then the inspection came—
a hundred prisoners crowded together,
do they need to be guarded by a thousand officers?
the prisoners were stripped bare—
they peeled warm skins because of the cold,
stripping away whatever could still be taken.

yet, my friend the poet seemed at ease about his notebook,
and when I asked him why, he began to explain:
that during yesterday's recreation hour,
the informant's attention had slipped,
so he buried it in a sack, beneath the tree—
for what was written inside it was poetry,
and its full account would take too long to tell.
It holds all the names of the killers,

the name of the ones in power.
It's all there, in the notebook—
sorrows, and weeping.pages of frustration,
all the officers' names were there too,

so that poetry might record their history
in elementary school textbooks—
written down as verse:
one single cure for all the world's afflictions,
our government, first in all the world,
its medicine effective for thousands of ailments:
Have a cold?
Take one pill and sleep.
Have an objection?

Take a blow, and be afraid—
my friend the poet.
He hid the notebook under the tree, and entrusted it to me.
I don't know why he chose me, but he did.
He looked at me, one long look, and said: the notebook—
it is a trust I carry, on behalf of every prisoner.
The world must know every prisoner's pain,
the shape his captive dreams have taken,
the look of a laugh, cut short.

The officer must understand that without a bullet, ‘

his own sting would dissolve to nothing.
Egypt must be shown as she truly is—
Egypt, in truth, is nothing but an image.
He filled his poetry with the history of the prison,
recorded hunger, and pain,
losing, and loss.
Our people are the ram,

gathered above it, beasts and hyenas.
Inside the prison, lions —
envied the free.

He recorded our dreams in the notebook,
he appointed our rulers through poems.
He left religion to God, and to the earth—
made clear that God is not the officer.
He gave out paradise to every poor soul,
he married the ruler's daughter to the son of a common guard.
He gave meaning to every clause of the constitution
that had gone, for years, without one.
He reunited every lover with the one they loved.
He restored Egypt to a decent worth again.
He made the Nile rise from Damietta itself,
so that Egypt might never go thirsty.
And so the ruling clique would never grow greedy again,
he took down the names of every prisoner,
he counted the pains of every cell,
he recorded everything that deserved recording,
believing that poetry grants time, and never merely delays it—
a reckoning, at last, for the thugs of power,
who sold us out, and let us go to ruin,
who ate their fill while we went hungry,
who left, and then came back again,
who rose against our revolution and stole our spring.

After that night had finally passed,
morning broke.
The night's chest pierced open with a spear.
I looked for the poet—
I couldn't find him.
"Where is the poet?"
My companions answered me: a visit.
He had missed his siblings, his family;
he had been breathing in that prison air
for so long and you ask for him on the very day of the visit!!!
I told myself, I'll go to that tree,
I'll go and bring back our notebook—
from beneath, to the right of the mulberry tree
Inside the notebook,
every prisoner's pain had gone silent,
every scream held prisoner in silence.
And when I arrived, I began to dig,
and time stretched on and on,
and I could not find it.
a trembling seized my grieving heart.
I searched there for the notebook,
if not there—where could it have gone?
I found nothing there, but a poet—
who was buried.

So, I swore to be true to my word:
I would come to this prison until the day I die.
What if I am freed?
I would come straight back.

Not because I had learned poetry—
no.
I would come to visit my murdered friend.