I really didn't expect this for this month of May 2021, already full of good news... But one of my poems has been published online by this lovely new website: Thawra.

I've been writing poetry for decades but rarely dared to send any...

Very grateful for this opportunity !

You can read here.

An extract here:

And the whole poem: 

Heavenly Gardens

An enemy of our future

Is walking by at dawn.

Our city, darker and darker,

Violated by a gesture,

All broken, drowned and done.

Paris floats like a dreamer.

Its people have become ghosts,

Lost in fear and in terror

Due to men whose hearts turned to stone.

Our meaning has gotten lost

And we no longer can honour

The promise we’ll never be alone.

After death should have come heaven,

We could only find blurred limbos.

Our children will have to look at a glow,

For a path cast away behind a forgotten garden;

And, you and I, we don’t know where it goes.

I only fathom my soul’s salvation, far below.

But the victims are sometimes silenced,

And the real perpetrators masquerade as saviours.

They have buried the traces of the past and distanced

Themselves from their old guilty crimes and dishonours.

Lost lives are all mourned,

But only some get to defend their dolors.

Deep inside my heart, I feel another world breathes,

Way underground, or over the rainbow,

And you and I can reach its gates if we drive

Far, far away, along the right way, beyond death.

Under a wreath, I will carry a crown and take a bow

While you will be able to catch the beat where we thrive.

By Melissa Chemam

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Thanks ever so much to the literary magazine Thawra for publishing my poetry... 

Thawra in Arabic means Revolution, a key word in my life! 

'Heavenly Gardens' was inspired by my experience just before, during and after the Paris attacks in 2015, and the love, inspiration and rebirth I found by coming to Bristol after spending 3 months in a war zone in Central Africa, weeks working on news from the Middle East - and especially Gaza and Turkey, then these terrible terrorist attacks and their aftermath... 

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And do check their website for more poems.

melissa x