(1)

 

I climb the walls of the city

trashed by enemy aircraft

and see Ninkal with her hair spread¹

over its ruins, lamenting as she beats herself.

 

Bulldozers scrape her off

so builders can smother her tombs in banking districts.

 

Above

above (and my heart is afraid of heights)

above the chimneys

above the minarets

above the cannons –

 

the rancid breath of those trapped below dirties our vision and launches it into space to be raked by bloody claws –

and the tower of Babel becomes clear…

 

smuts

from the soot of factories

soil the museum exhibits

pilfered by Bedouins under their djellabas

and governments don’t notice

and the tower guard didn’t notice

his majesty passing.

 

When he asks for Gilgamesh’s plant –

Sir, it was eaten by a sheep, but wasn’t it your nose, pardon me,

that was sniffing that pile of shit…

 

But before he could see into the depths

they buried him in shit up to his eyeballs

…and then he saw everything…….

…………….

…………….

 

and nothing –

 

(2)

 

The invaders come after the tyrants,

the tyrants come after the invaders

and nothing happens…

they replace handcuffs

with other handcuffs

and prisons

with other….

And time stretches out

in hunger

exile

and oppression

while they keep going,

generation after generation

 

…………………..

…………………..

 

I sleep and wake, but I can’t find morning –

who stole it? – Oh cockerel exulting on city balconies…..

………………….

………………….

 

How long can I cure loneliness with writing?

I say to Gilgamesh:

If you saw what we’ve seen

you’d have pissed on it.

 

And I ask: is our life a prison?

Is my book a grave?

Is the door a dream for me to go through?

Did I risk death to glimpse a parallel world

beyond Milton’s imagining?

 

I lift my head from the lines to see

children playing with our legacy

fields of bombs

and young girls by the Tigris

washing their faces

so their beauty drains away to be drunk by the sea –

how many of our dreams did the sea drink

as we sat on the timeless stones of Babylon?

……………………

……………………

 

There will be no light more beautiful than the sun of freedom the day we smash down the doors and summon tyrants to judgment.

……………………

……………………

 

(3)

 

I hear the rattle of shop fronts, texts, and the screech of teeth against glass : worms wriggle from her cheeks the moment graveyards – I mean – skeletons –walk towards the city, issuing commands : the skeletons stretch out : people run away, so do electricity pylons, roads, farms and vans.

 

I wake to the sound of an ambulance

   carrying my mind

   to the operating room,

choked by the dust of dictionaries and nurses.

And my serum runs away down a tube of streets to the sea…

 

(4)

 

The Mongols come

riding our skinny horses

bursting into our blood

that’s blue as ink

or red as a bloodshot eye:

cannons come

informers come

and British soldiers creep

into Sha‘lān’s house²

 

As the Umayyad armies withdraw from Sūrat al-Fath

  I point to the horizon, black with aircraft droppings

and Abboud guffaws while showing the hole in his jacket

  where the war went through…

 

Oh you … General, monitoring –

from a screen next to your bed –

  the mortars pounding our cities

while chewing the stem of your foreign pipe

 

is this all that’s left of my homeland?

(You dead people rise up!³

and Would you have the courtesy to return my pitchfork?)⁴

 

My tears are stones – take them to the sea – rinse them in poetry –

from the stained urn that displays me to the creatures of the universe I leak out in words as an

exhalation of glory turned into stars…

 

I open the album

and cry for friends who were lost in the night of the battlefields,

the cities, the memories…

why does the war shatter me in two?

Why does night stamp like a soldier’s boot on my chest?

 

I try to write in darkness – stealing light from flares.

The bombardment began heavily tonight,

shaking us like sardines in a can.

We are not dead or alive:

And (… I was born, and died…)

And (…no mules or soldiers killed, no losses or gains…)

 

News bulletins make us switch to other frequencies

which crisscross the stony trench

carrying scum and capital cities in miniskirts, wars,

mass murder, exiled revolutionaries, an advert for a platonic, chocolate-flavoured love potion.

 

And tomorrow, who knows where we will be buried?

We who have no hand-span of land and can own no grave or shroud.

 

(The American bulldozers bury us, far away in the desert, then the wild animals dig us up, so our families bury us again, then the bulldozers of the Republican Guard dig us up, then we are buried by the…)

……………….

 

(5)

 

Why did you leave your country?

The dates were yours – the wine

and the Babylonian heaven?

It wasn’t that I was ungrateful, oh you that lay blame while lounging in cafés in exile –

but embers burn

only those who touch them.

 

I shall accept whatever God chooses for me in exile

except humiliation.

I cross the streets, empty inside,

bewildered

like

I just

left

prison

I bite on life with the teeth of my being

and rise up proud

with my anthem

I scratch the sky to make it rain on me.

Wherever songs flourish will be my home.

If I exchange one land for another

how shall I sleep

when this pillow is not your arms

this is……….

 

(I warned them –

This isn’t land but the back of a whale;⁵

don’t burn it with the angry fires of war!

They laughed in my face,

and were shrugged off into the sea,

out of reach of their ships.)

 

I said: I waited for you……

to wander with you in the alleys (there’s no home for me

except the shade of a poem,

which I throw to the ground like a mat to sleep on)

 

hotels reject us

and strange roads rest on my shoulders

your tears wet my shirt

your eyelids tell me about the movement of clouds,

about the hunger of your two children in the land of palm trees……

………………

………………

 

(6)

 

We sleep and dream about dawn

but dawn is very far away –

it is still behind bars:

I saw the sleepy moon being carried in the jaws of a whale.

 

We sing while beating empty cans – oh

whale, swallower,

return our moon quickly!

 

But the whale turned into a monster –

the swallowed moon has been forgotten by children

 

Exile unites us and our homeland divides us.

So who sings to sad humanity

the song of forgiveness we carry inside us?

 

 

 

Notes

1. Ninkal’s Lament is from the Book of Sumer ‘Oh city lament…/ Your sacred temples have been destroyed and your gardens are ruined…/ the barbarians have slaughtered your people…/ your people have been exiled and Ur is destroyed…’
2. Sha‘lān Abul-Jun – one of the heroes of the post-1920 revolution in Iraq.
3. A French sergeant in 1915, the last man standing of his battalion, who, when attacked by Germans, shouted ‘Arise, my dead friends!’
4. From a revolutionary song which describes a peasant, who, after stabbing a British soldier with his pitchfork, asks politely for his pitchfork back.
5. A reference to the story of Sindibad.

Suleimaniyah (a stable in the village of Shaikh Awsal)

Camp 575, Sheraton Al Basra, Prison in Kirkuk, Al Kufa, Baghdad, Cairo,

Amman, Sana’a, Aden, Al Khartoum, Damascus, Beirut …