Bani Na'im - بني نعيم: I dream of Bani Naim

I dream of Bani Naim

Sometimes it is hard to imagine that I would leave this world without closing the cycle by going back to the place of my birth, Bani Naim. Even though I am physically too far away from this place, I still dream of Bani Naim very often. These dreams are becoming vivid and surprisingly quite detailed. I left this place of birth over four decades ago and one might think the details, topographic changes, and the increase of population will contribute to erasing the memories that I had during my childhood and early teenager years. On the contrary, the bizarre thing about my recurrent dreams is that the topographic changes that happened in Bani Naim through the years are rather accurate in these visions. The only explanation to these dreams is indeed my soul fluttered in the skies of Bani Naim. This is considered a paranormal phenomena and not everybody believes in such thing.
In many occasions, I felt I may have been suffering from insomnia due to inability to sleep the entire night. This is perhaps I was afraid I may not be able to wake up from my sleeps. For many nights, I was laying down in bed staring at the ceiling for hours. In one long and sleepless night I thought of the following lines:

If I die before I see you free
Take me in a coffin across the ravine
To Bani Naim straight ahead
Tell the border guards
Tell them, tell them
I am asleep, but not dead

These are not poetic lines since I am not a poems' writer, but appear to rhyme and they possibly could be used as a good lyric. Dreaming of Bani Naim?s allies and streets is very soothing. Every morning I wake up with these dreams, I feel content and at ease for the rest of the day. A night without such dreams is bothersome. In one weekend morning I was relaxing and sipping a cup of coffee and suddenly I worried that I may expire before I physically visit Bani Naim and close the cycle of life. During that morning I wrote these lines:

If I fail to meet you on a date
I promise to send my soul
To inspect your allies new and old
Every night hot or cold
To stroke your hills, bushes, and trees
In a nice, nice summer cool breeze
Or in a wintry harsh freeze

Life after death is a mysterious subject that everyone has an opinion about it. Whole religions and cultures all over the ancient and new worlds were based on this subject. I grew up in a culture where the existence of soul is part of the rituals and fate. So I imagined that my soul can in fact talk back to me. In this contest I believed that my soul promised me to close the cycle for me if I ever failed to go back to Bani Naim. In this regard, the following lines were written:

My soul pledged in pain
If somehow I fail to return
To perpetually soar in your skies
Looking after the children with wide, wide open eyes

Omar Manasreh
21 January 2010