Poem: "Against the World"

This poem came out of the August 6, 2013 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by a prompt from Anthony Barrette.  It has been sponsored from the general fund.  You can read more about the Bedouin people online.

The name Bedouin
comes from the Arabic
badawī  and its plural badawiyyīn
and means "those in the desert."

They have a saying that goes,
"I against my brothers,
my brothers and I against my cousins,
then my brothers, my cousins, and I against the world."

They travel in a tent-family, a gio bayt,
or in good times a cluster of tents called a goum.
Beyond that is the kin-group of cousins, the ibn ʿamm,
and then the tribe as a whole led by a Sheikh.

Historically, the Bedouin people are known
as nomads, following their herds across the sand,
sometimes practicing agriculture or fishing along the way,
always driven by the search for water and other scarce supplies.

In modern times, many of them have settled
in cities or villages, hemmed in by sedentary folk,
taking up trades such as falconry or the breeding of white doves
so that they might seem to fit in --

but still the sand shifts and whispers in their footsteps behind them.