El Habib Louai is an Amazigh poet and translator from Taroudant, Morocco. He edited and translated an anthology of contemporary Moroccan poetry for Big Bridge Magazine. He is also the representative of 100 Thousand Poets for Change event in Agadir, Morocco. Louai has been rewarded Aimee Grunberger scholarship by Naropa University to participate in Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics summer creative writing program. His collection Mrs. Jones Will Now Know: Poems of a Desperate Rebel was published last summer by Paper Press. His translation of Michael Rothenberg’s Indefinite Detention: A Dog Story is coming out in January 2016. Agadir, Morocco
What did we do wrong?
Except that we dreamed the dreams of free men
in winter with holes in our stomachs.
We never asked for too much
in a life already full of holes.
What did we do wrong?
Except that we wanted to
retrieve some deep silence in our throats.
Except that we said no to privatization of
what remains of national education.
It was hard to get your attention politely.
How many years did we sit smoking dreamily
in the direction of the prime minister’s villa
waiting for unilateral decisions?
We had no intentions to burn it down!
Backyard dogs tear at our shirts.
Pregnant women ran over, flattened out,
their breasts were stuck all red with blood.
Militarized batons became
disaffiliated members of their race.
My life flashed in front of my face.
Here is a snapshot of me as a stripped baby.
Next I woke up in a dark emergency room.
What is liberty to the poor, old woman
selling smokes and peanuts, plastic bags
effacing her fingerprints in Medina souks?
What is liberty to the bent, turbaned
head of a sexagenarian veteran
gazing at the void between crevices?
He never asked for a piece of the cake.
He rotted securing your motherland.
What did we do wrong?
Except that we dreamed the dreams of free men
in winter with holes in our stomachs.
We never asked for too much
in a life already full of holes.
