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Rasha Omran: ‘I Want to Smile’

This poem, by award-winning author Rasha Omran, appears in our latest issue, SYRIA: Fall of Eternity, ed. Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam. If you’re in Berlin, join us for a launch event on May 3, 2026.

I Want to Smile

By Rasha Omran

 

Early 2025

 

. . . for my mouth to grow wide with laughter.

For my eyes to shrink to the size of pinpricks from laughing so hard.

I want to step out on my balcony and hang my laughter out on the clothesline, so that passersby can catch hold of it, scale the wall to the fourth floor, and laugh with me.

I want to post my laughs on Facebook, so that friends can like and share them endlessly on their pages.

I want to make a documentary of my laughter and turn my building’s bawwab, the vegetable-sellers, the shopkeepers, and the café-goers who watch the rear ends of passing women into the heroes of my rare film.

I want to buy a sheet of canvas and oil paints, then paint my laughter in every possible color. When I’m done, I’ll hang it in the middle of the capitals’ main squares, so that the soldiers deployed there grin at its colors, just like the prisoners in the backs of tightly sealed trucks, with nothing but tiny openings to let in a puff of air and the scent of laughter.

I want to roll my laughter into colorful balls and leave them in the streets for children to kick around without a care.

I want to laugh a lot, because all I’ve done is plant my life—a tree of sadness—in the middle of nowhere.

I want to laugh hard; me, who’s crying now as she searches for an image of herself laughing to superimpose over the image of the last homeland she knew and the last man she loved, so that she can manage to believe what no one else will.

–Translated by M Lynx Qualey

Rasha Omran (born in Tartus, Syria, in 1964) was expelled from the country because of her involvement in opposition to the Assad regime and currently lives in Cairo. The daughter of Syrian poet Mohammad Omran, she is one of her country’s most important poets. In the late ‘90s she founded the Al-Sindiyan literary and cultural festival in her home city, and was its director for 16 years.