Pity the Nation

Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran’s poem “Pity the Nation”, published posthumously in the book The Garden of the Prophet in 1933, inspired both English journalist Robert Fisk and Beat Generation poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. While Fisk’s book, eponymously titled “Pity the Nation” (1990), is an account of the 1975-1990 Lebanese civil war, Ferlinghetti’s thought-provoking poem (2006), in a riff on … Read more