What Do I Say?

"What do I say" (Arabic: ماذا أقول) is a famous poem written by the Syrian poet Hasan Alkhayer (Arabic حسن الخيّر) in 1979. He had criticized both the austere regime and the militant terrorists who together had crippled life in Syria in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He was later kidnapped and killed, in 1980.

The poem was a remarkable contribution by a Syrian intellectual in Syria's recent history that added color to the flame of life in the stagnant political atmosphere. In this poem, Hasan succeeds in expressing complex contemporary issues in very simple language.

Hasan Alkhayer might have been an Alawite