with the striking of Bouazizi‘s match.
The despots stare with their uneasy grins
as the flickering fires of Carthage catch.
The people of a thousand crescent lands
cast off their shah, their colonel or their king
whose bullets fail to silence their demands—
These are the triumphs of the Arab Spring.
But now, as the uncertain summer comes,
we wait to see what rises from the rain.
Will there be harvests of bread or of crumbs?
How much of freedom’s kernel will remain?
In Cairo, Damascus, Tripoli, Bahrain,
will the autumn yield to her people gain?
This is a sonnet I began thinking of back in the early part of this year while I was reading about the events in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya and elsewhere. The self immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi I found particularly striking and heart wrenching. The man, after being harassed for years by corrupt government officials, had his vegetable cart confiscated and was left without means to support his family. In frustration he doused himself with gasoline and lit himself on fire in front of the government building screaming, “how do you expect me to make a living.” He died eighteen days later from his injuries.
Bouazizi’s death sparked a major revolution in Tunisia (ancient Carthage) which in turn galvanized protest movements in dozens of other countries in the Arab world. This has come to be known as the Arab Spring and has resulted in the toppling of three dictatorships (at the time of this writing Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya has just fallen under rebel control). In this poem I wanted to celebrate the victories of these democratic uprisings, but I also want to inject a bit of realism that the dawn of these new governments may not be as bright as they first seem. The freshness of Spring dulls in the sweat of Summer and we do not yet know what fruit will come from this season’s sowing.