Sudanese Poetry | Reading أبو ذكرى Abu Zikra & صلاح أحمد إبراهيم Salah Ahmad Ibrahim

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:05]Light illumined my window this morning and spilled its luminous water in crystals under the door.

[00:00:12]It couldn't catch an inside view except a sigh of longing and me staring at the waking up windows to hear chatters around breakfast tables and at that point feel the bliss of life soft and sweet invading my ribs.

[00:00:27]In my rapture I almost flew to embrace the buses, the pavement swim in the green lake of a tree growing at my doorstep and drown myself in the dew of the eyes of a girl with pretty eyes.

[00:00:42]This poem was written by a Sudanese poet Abdallah Rahim Abu Zikra. He's a rather famous Sudanese poet with two very distinct phases of his poetry, one coming in the earlier stages of his publications and another in the later stages.

[00:00:57]This one that I just read was from his earlier stages from the '60s into the mid-'70s until he began developing a melancholic voice that led to his death in 1989.

[00:01:07]One example of his later works is Al-Rahil fi al-Layl or The Parting at Night.

[00:01:14]Death will come. It will have your eyes.

[00:01:17]This death is keeping our company day and night, sleepless death like a veteran grief or a meaningless sin.

[00:01:26]Your eyes then will be meaningless words, a muffled cry, silence.

[00:01:31]Silently we will sink to the abyss.

[00:01:36]But Abu Zikra was also in his earlier years an optimist and idealist who longed for a world sensitive to the sufferings of the poor and the suppressed.

[00:01:46]If I owned this world and if the powerful jinn soldiers of Solomon were still alive, I would order Karima to send me hills of fresh Gondaila dates. I would order deliveries of ivory and beach, and I would order the Kandakes to recall the legends of Meroe.

[00:02:03]I would run water springs for us to wash up and would weave a bracelet of yearning into a love poem for his face shining with beauty like a bright moon.

[00:02:15]That poem was called Hubb al-Fuqara.

[00:02:18]I'm not quite sure if I pronounced that correctly, but in English it's called My Beloved the Poor. Abu Zikra unfortunately killed himself rather shortly after receiving a PhD in the Russian language in the uh Russian Sciences Academy in Moscow. He threw himself out of the building.

[00:02:36]As I said, he is one of the most well-known Sudanese poets today and was known as highly intelligent and sensitive in his life. I want to share another poem from another famous Sudanese poet.

[00:02:48]Were they a bundle of arugula displayed for sale to the Westerners in the big city, they'd have been spared the scorching heat.

[00:02:56]Instead, they'd have been carefully placed on a wet mat in the shade. Their lips kept wet with sprinkled water.

[00:03:03]Their cheeks sparkling with freshness and moisture.

[00:03:06]This was written by Salah Ahmed Ibrahim.

[00:03:09]He was a key poet in the Sudanese trend from romanticism to social realism. And this poem was written in response to Sudanese peasants who, while protesting for their rights as humans, were locked away in a poorly ventilated cell where they suffocated to death. Salah was an outspoken supporter of Sudanese people, but spent his later years unfortunately away from Sudan in countries like Algeria, Ghana, and France. He expresses his homesickness in this poem.

[00:03:38]One week passed and two weeks, and I am hungry. Hungry and no heart cares.

[00:03:43]Thirsty and they would not give me a drink, and the Nile is far.

[00:03:48]I am alone thinking of my mother and my brothers and the one who recites the Quran in the middle of the night.

[00:03:54]In my country, the faraway land of my friends, lying far beyond the sea and the desert.

[00:04:00]In my country, where the stranger is respected and the guest is loved and given the last drop of water in the middle of summer, and preferred with the dinner of the children, or met with a welcoming smile when there is nothing to give.

[00:04:14]And began to sing with yearning, my pain is keen.

[00:04:18]Oh, my grating birds that are flying towards my land, by God, carry me with you. I am ready.

[00:04:24]Fate has shorn my wings, and in a corner I sit on my baggage.

[00:04:29]And when the shadow recedes, I move to another.

[00:04:32]But the birds have gone and left me.

[00:04:35]They did not understand the meaning of my song.

[00:04:38]While many of Salih's poems are written, of course, with uh politics in mind and are politically driven, he also wrote a couple love poems. His love poems are as vivid as his poems in protest of the violations of human rights in Sudan and across Africa.

[00:04:55]I sought to make you, beloved, a present for you whose eyes radiate compassion and who fills my heart with warmth and tenderness.

[00:05:03]I collected together the sandalwood and sprinkled it with oil and lighted the wood.

[00:05:08]I blew on it until my lungs were filled with smoke. The wood was kindled into flames. On the flames, I melted treasures of silver and gold and stirred the molten metal with both my hands. My naked ebony body perspiring with running sweat. The glow of the flames reflected in my face, and in my ears the voices of innocent children in a chorus chanting hymns with sincerity and innocence, with faith and warmth, ringing in a sacred silence like silver bells.

[00:05:40]There I stood upright like a giant in front of the anvil and hammered the word into a slaver and polished it with light of my eyes until it shone. And on it I traced my dreams and with mystic letters wrote on it my love story and engraved on it magic charms and spells from the age of Solomon and inscribed two letters from your name and from mine.

[00:06:06]This is quite a small selection of poems. There are many Sudanese poets and Sudanese poetry is really really beautiful. A lot of it of course is inspired by the political situation in Sudan.

[00:06:18]Um which I mean of course because how are you going to write poetry about anything else if all you can see is all the horrible things happening around you. Sudan is obviously going through a lot of political strife right now and in fact it is actually going through one of the biggest human rights violations in the world with a mass starvation going on, um a lack of clean water, a lack of food, a lack of education for children, and all around just not a very good uh situation.

[00:06:58]Um the main point of these videos is going to be just to kind of show the expressions of beauty and poetry and lyricism that are basically inherent to human nature. I mean they show up in every single culture you have this art of poetry and so I want to show that this is our universal connection with each other is the art and the love that we express. I will put more links in the description as well about more Sudanese poets that you can go and read about and read their poems because it's absolutely worth it. The poets that I read from today I got translations from the modern anthology of Sudanese poetry, which was translated into English by by Adil Babikir. I'm sorry if I don't pronounce that correctly, but it's a very good book and I do highly recommend that you go buy it and read it. I will also put some charities in the description in case you feel like you can um offer any money at the moment to charities who are helping people in Sudan to find food, shelter, water, and safety from the RSF, which is the Rapid Support Forces. The Rapid Support Forces are funded by the United Arab Emirates.

[00:08:09]Sudanese culture is a culture certainly worth celebrating. And beyond their poetry, as I said earlier, their dances and their music is absolutely amazing.

[00:08:19]Their history is absolutely fascinating.

[00:08:21]So, if you want to learn more about Sudan and about its history, I will put more links in the description because I do want people to go out and learn more about it beyond just looking at a YouTube video because it is fascinating to me. And I just want it to be fascinating to other people as well. Thank you for listening to this poetry, and I hope that you feel connected to these people, even if they're very, very far away from where you are.