‘The South, The Last Day’: A Poem for Amal Khalil
The South, The Last Day
To Amal Khalil
By Abbas Beydoun
Translated by Yasmine Khayyat
The South could be the last land,
The last testament, perhaps the last sip
The last lira, the last medicine, the last day.
From its word
We can fashion a lament, a wreath, or even a prayer.
We can name it after ancient trees
Or turn it into a message, a museum
Even a dish, a dessert
The South
We could not place it at the center
Nor raise its mountains
That remained mere hills
Nor make its borders impregnable
Nor sell it as history or legend
It came from a single memory
Eternity needed no more than that
An eternity fulfilled in a day
A day whose twilight still lingers
Whose dawn still rises
Whose tears still flow
The villages are words without voices
Words inseparable from their grasses
Inseparable from their pastures
Where everything petrifies in the vast openness
In the soil that forms like a wild heart
A heart of dust
An incomplete beginning
The villages are words for the sleeping wilderness
Perhaps names for what churns within it
Pebbles rolling like camels and secrets
These faces may bear a gentle edge
Like hills that never grew tall
A beauty that never glimpsed itself
It stood bare without a breeze
completed in absence, in a quiet slipping away
As you enter with all this vista
Into the transcendent age, into the first hour
Where time alone is sovereign
And the sun has no end
Your smile never failed you
It adorned your face
another name, another home
You are the orphan of the mountain and of time
The orphan of your heart, the sky, your beauty
It was your adornment, your sign
With it, you greet ruin
And host the rubble
You arrived at the fold of yourself
Arrived with this tormented twilight
And offered your orphanhood to the house
That kept counting your sighs
Before closing in on you
Until your smile alone remained
A light from the last land
A single sip
The last day
الجنوب،اخر يوم
Abbas Beydoun is a Lebanese poet, novelist, essayist, and journalist. He has published 21 poetry collections and 7 novels. He was awarded the Mediterranean prize for poetry and the 2017 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his novel Autumn of Innocence. He has published many volumes of poetry, some of which have been translated into French, Italian, German, and English. His novel Tahlil damm (2002) was translated by Max Weiss and published as Blood Test (Syracuse University Press, 2008), winning the Arkansas Arabic Translation Award. Read more on his work at the LEILA website.
Yasmine Khayyat is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Beirut. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University in 2012. Her research interests include wartime Arabic literature and cultural memory, Ecofiction and the encounter with oil, and human/nonhuman entanglements in fiction. Her first book, War Remains: Ruination and Resistance in Lebanon ( Syracuse University Press, 2023), examines the figuration of the ruin as a site of protest and resistance in contemporary Lebanese cultural production. Khayyat’s publications have appeared in the Journal of Arabic Literature, Middle Eastern Literatures, Critical Inquiry, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and Human Organization, among others. Before joining AUB, she taught at Rutgers University (2013-2025). She resides in Beirut with her spouse, twin daughters, and their three cats: Mais al-Jabal, Minyas, and Violet.