Romantique 2011 ( Author

The Axes and saws you see are not for cutting down trees and what you see is not water nor it is a lake. All that matter is that the Lumberjacks carried the leftover fragments and set the forest on fire. Although most of us will embrace the future and welcome it with open arms, some came from swamps to preach their beliefs using a history that concerns none of us. Therefore, the necessity was dire and brutal when all those bodies have fallen. In our lands lived mercenaries and opportunists alongside mobs and criminals, so did fools and thieves. Many overwhelmed us with useless empty discussions that imitate nothing but women's gossip; they cried out the name of a god whom they dragged out of a book soaked with the menses of virgins. We thought that their religion was theirs and only theirs, but we were mistaken, for they declared invasions and conquests, opened slave markets, and started debating whether we should be gunned down or slaughtered by their hands. Some new arrivals benefited from this massacre, they declared self-governed protectorates, some were religiously based while others were based on ethnicities, and they got protection from countries and other groups. Therefore, the land became a place where ancient conflicts are seeking to be settled. While all that was taking place, containers of bombs and rockets were falling off from the planes the president who destroyed the land and its people using nothing but the land's own army. Ahmad Sleiman
About the Author: Ahmad Sleiman: A Syrian author and poet. His writings tackle various topics, such as civil rights. As a human rights activist, he worked as a free-lance human rights journalist. He left Syria to settle down in Beirut, Lebanon as if it was some sort if optional exile; it was a difficult choice for an 18-year-old to make after being arrested with a left-wing group. His crimes where nothing but reading and publishing banned books and attending cultural gatherings. Sometimes the crime was meeting some friends. Crimes like this were enough to make people perish in concentration camps. He lived in Beirut from 1990 until 2003, during this period he was active in many cultural fields. He launched ALAN "NOW," the center through which he published various books. The threats to his personal safety continued, so he had to move to Germany. He published five poetry books, two narrative works, and an intellectual book, which mainly talks about democracy and the future: The Secret Grandchild. Numbness of Forgetfulness, Fire Flowers, I Form, The Dream's Hat, The Controversy of the Present, Romantique 2011, and afflicted love. The author is also the editor and administrator of a number of websites including Opinion Activist at www.opl-now.org