So Bin Laden’s - a piece of sewage and a poet to boot

It is well known that the war criminal Radovan Karadzic found time to pen poetry when not presiding over the slaughter of Bosniaks. Well poetry is a generous description for the crap he produced. Here is an example:

Sarajevo

I hear the misfortune threads
Turned into a beetle as if an old singer
Is crushed by the silence and turned into a voice.

The town burns like a piece of incense
In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.
Empty suits slide down the town.
Red is the stone that dies, built into a house. The Plague!

Calm. The army of armed poplar tree
Marches up the hill, within itself.
The aggressor air storms our souls
and once you are human and then you are an air creature.

I know that all of these are the preparations of the scream:
What does the black metal in the garage have for us?
Look how fear turned into a spider
Looking for the answer at his computer.

BBC translator said his poems were as "bad in the original as they sound in the English translation"

If that was not bad enough the Times poetry reports that Osama Bin Laden is to be published next week by an Oxford-educated academic, who discovered that he had once been in great demand as an after-dinner speaker.

Bin Laden’s recitals at wedding banquets and other feasts during the 1990s were recorded on tapes recovered from his compound in Afghanistan in 2001. They have been studied by Professor Flagg Miller, who teaches Arabic poetry at the University of California, Davis. He said: “Bin Laden is a skilled poet with clever rhymes and meters, which was one reason why many people taped him and passed recordings around, like pop songs.”

“They reveal Osama Bin Laden as the performer, the entertainer with an agenda,” Miller said. “He told gory tales of dead mujaheddin from the villages where he was speaking, which was often the first time their families had learned of their fates. He mixed this news up with radical theology and his own verse based on the traditions of hamasa - a warlike poetic tradition from Oman calculated to capture the interest of young men.” Miller said Bin Laden was calculating. “He crafts his words to excite the urban dissatisfied youth, offering them escape from their elders and villages. Instead, many just die in terrible ways.”

Other Arabic specialists are unhappy that the tapes have come to light. “They seem adolescent and brutal, like a video nasty, composed with minimal skill to win over the susceptible mind of the young and bloodthirsty male,” said one academic, who did not want to be named.“Whatever else Bin Laden is, he is now exposed as a disgrace to two millennia of Arabic culture.”

Here is an example of his work.

Tomorrow, William, you will discover which young man [will] confront your brethren, who have been deceived by [their own] leaders.

A youth, who plunged into the smoke of war, smiling

He hunches forth, staining the blades of lances red

May God not let my eye stray from the most eminent

Humans, should they fall, Djinn, should they ride

[And] lions of the jungle, whose only fangs

[Are their] lances and short Indian swords

As the stallion bears my witness that I hold them back

[My] stabbing is like the cinders of fire that explode into flame

On the day of the stallions’ expulsion, how the war-cries attest to me

As do stabbing, striking, pens, and books.

In my view it is ugly and brutal fare. I would not offer up a line of verse by Farrokhzad for the complete works of this evil man. That said I’m sure there will be a few who will appreciate this crap. I can just picture a certain ersatz Mexican getting an orgasm over it though.