Iraq लेबलों वाले संदेश दिखाए जा रहे हैं. सभी संदेश दिखाएं
Iraq लेबलों वाले संदेश दिखाए जा रहे हैं. सभी संदेश दिखाएं

7 अगस्त 2023

The Veil of Religions

If You are One
And Your teachings are one,
Why did You engrave our infancy in the tablets of the Torah,
And ornament our youth with the Gospels
Only to erase all that in Your Final Book?
Why did You draw us, the ones who acknowledge Your Oneness,
Into disagreement?
Why did You multiply in us
When You are the One and Only?

--- Amal Al-Jubouri
Translated by A.Z. Foreman

10 मई 2021

My Poem Will Not Save You

Remember the toddler lying face down
on the sand, and the waves gently receding
from his body as if a forgotten dream?

My poem will not turn him onto his back
and lift him up
to his feet
so he can run
into a familiar lap
like before.
I am sorry
my poem will not
block the shells
when they fall
onto a sleeping town,
will not stop the buildings
from collapsing
around their residents,
will not pick up the broken-leg flower
from under the shrapnel,
will not raise the dead.

My poem will not defuse
the bomb
in the public square.
It will soon explode
where the girl insists
that her father buy her gum.

My poem will not rush them
to leave the place
and ride the car
that will just miss the explosion.
Many mistakes in life
will not be corrected by my poem.
Questions will not be answered.
I am sorry
my poem will not save you.

My poem cannot return
all of your losses,
not even some of them,
and those who went far away
my poem won’t know how to bring them back
to their lovers.
I am sorry.
I don’t know why the birds
sing
during their crossings
over our ruins.

Their songs will not save us,
although, in the chilliest times,
they keep us warm,
and when we need to touch the soul
to know it’s not dead
their songs
give us that touch.

--- Dunya Mikhail

4 सितंबर 2012

The Game

He is a poor pawn.
He always jumps to the next square.
He doesn’t turn left or right
and doesn’t look back.
He is moved by a foolish queen
who cuts across the board
lengthwise and diagonally.
She doesn’t tire of carrying the medals
and cursing the bishops.
She is a poor queen
moved by a reckless king
who counts the squares every day
and claims that they are diminishing.
He arranges the knights and rooks
and dreams of a stubborn opponent.
He is a poor king
moved by an experienced player
who rubs his head
and loses his time in an endless game.
He is a poor player
moved by an empty life
without black or white.
It is a poor life
moved by a bewildered god
who once tried to play with clay.
He is a poor god.
He doesn’t know how
to escape
from his dilemma.

---Dunya Mikhail
[translated from the Arabic by Elizabeth Winslow]

23 मार्च 2011

America, America

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

The French general who raised his tricolor over Nuqrat al-Salman
where I was a prisoner thirty years ago …
in the middle of that U-turn that split the back of the Iraqi army,
the general who loved Saint Emilion wines called Nuqrat al-Salman a fort …
Of the surface of the earth, generals know only two dimensions:
whatever rises is a fort,
whatever spreads is a battlefield.
How ignorant the general was!

But Liberation was better versed in topography.
The Iraqi boy who conquered her front page sat carbonized behind a steering wheel
on the Kuwait-Safwan highway while television cameras
(the booty of the defeated and their identity)
were safe in a truck like a storefront on Rivoli Street.
The neutron bomb is highly intelligent.
It distinguishes between an "I" and an "Identity."

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

Blues
How long must I walk to Sacramento?
How long must I walk to Sacramento?
How long will I walk to reach my home?
How long will I walk to reach my girl?
How long must I walk to Sacramento?
For two days, no boat has sailed this stream,
Two days, two days, two days.
Honey, how can I ride?
I know this stream,
But, O but, O but,
For two days, no boat has sailed this stream.
La Li La La Li La
La Li La La Li La
A stranger becomes afraid.
Have no fear, dear horse.
No fear of the wolves of the wild,
No fear, for the land is my land.
La Li La La Li La
La Li La La Li La
A stranger becomes afraid.

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
and John Silver's parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steam-boats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.
Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the Stone Age?
I need neither oil nor America herself,
neither the elephant nor the donkey.
Leave me, pilot, leave my house roofed with palm fronds and this wooden bridge.
I need neither your Golden Gate nor your skyscrapers.
I need the village, not New York.
Why did you come to me from your Nevada desert, soldier armed to the teeth?
Why did you come all the way to distant Basra, where fish used to swim by our doorsteps?
Pigs do not forage here.
I only have these water buffaloes lazily chewing on water lilies.
Leave me alone, soldier.
Leave me my floating cane hut and my fishing spear.
Leave me my migrating birds and the green plumes.
Take your roaring iron birds and your Toma-hawk missiles.
I am not your foe.
I am the one who wades up to the knees in rice paddies.
Leave me to my curse.
I do not need your day of doom.

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

America:
let's exchange gifts.
Take your smuggled cigarettes
and give us potatoes.
Take James Bond's golden pistol
and give us Marilyn Monroe's giggle.
Take the heroin syringe under the tree
and give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
and give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
Take the Afghani mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln or give us no one.

Now as I look across the balcony,
across the summer sky, the summery summer,
Damascus spins, dizzied among television aerials,
then it sinks, deeply,
in the stones of the forts, in towers, in the arabesques of ivory,
and sinks, deeply, far from Rukn el-Din
and disappears far from the balcony.

And now
I remember trees:
the date palm of our mosque in Basra,
at the end of Basra
a bird's beak, a child's secret, a summer feast.
I remember the date palm.
I touch it. I become it, when it falls black without fronds,
when a dam fell, hewn by lightning.
And I remember the mighty mulberry
when it rumbled, butchered with an axe …
to fill the stream with leaves
and birds
and angels
and green blood.
I remember when pomegranate blossoms covered the sidewalks.
The students were leading the workers parade …

The trees die pummeled.
Dizzied, not standing, the trees die.

God save America,
My home, sweet home!

We are not hostages, America,
and your soldiers are not God's soldiers …
We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the
drowned gods,
the gods of bulls,
the gods of fires,
the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and
blood in a song ‥

We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor,
who emerges out of farmers' ribs,
hungry
and bright,
and raises heads up high …
America, we are the dead.
Let your soldiers come.
Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him.
We are the drowned ones, dear lady.
We are the drowned.
Let the water come.

--- Saadi Youssef

(translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa)

7 फ़रवरी 2011

The Dragon

A dictator, hiding behind a nihilist's mask,
has killed and killed and killed,
pillaged and wasted,
but is afraid, he claims,
to kill a sparrow.
His smiling picture is everywhere:
in the coffeehouse, in the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.
Satan used to be an original,
now he is just the dictator's shadow.
The dictator has banned the solar calendar,
abolished Neruda, Marquez, and Amado,
abolished the Constitution;
he's given his name to all the squares, the open spaces,
the rivers,
and all the jails in his blighted homeland.
He's burned the last soothsayer
who failed to kneel before the idol.
He's doled out death as a gift or a pledge.
His watchdogs have corrupted the land,
stolen the people's food,
raped the Muses,
raped the widows of the men who died under torture,
raped the daughters and widows of his soldiers
who lost the war,
from which, like rabbits in clover fields,
they had run away,
leaving behind corpses of workers and peasants,
writers and artists,
twenty-year-old children,
carpenters and ironsmiths,
hungry and burned under the autumn sky,
all forcibly led to slaughter,
killed by invaders, alien and homegrown.
The dictator hides his disgraced face in the mud.
Now he is having a taste of his own medicine,
and the pillars of deception have collapsed,
his picture is now underfoot,
trampled by history's worn shoes.
The deposed dictator is executed in exile,
another monster is crowned in the hapless homeland.
The hourglass restarts,
counting the breaths of the new dictator,
lurking everywhere,
in the coffeehouse, the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.


2
From the Caribbean to China's Great Wall,
the dictator-dragon is being cloned.
When will you do it, St George?


---"The Dragon", by the Iraqi poet Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayyati (1926-1999) was originally published in 1996. The translation appearing on this page is by Farouk Abdel Wahab, Najat Rahman, and Carolina Hotchandani. It is from the volume Iraqi Poetry Today (ISBN 095338246X) (c) 2003, edited by Saadi Simawe.

10 अक्तूबर 2010

Reality

In love, nothing exists between heart and heart.
Speech is born out of longing,
True description from the real taste.
The one who tastes, knows;
the one who explains, lies.
How can you describe the true form of Something
In whose presence you are blotted out?
And in whose being you still exist?
And who lives as a sign for your journey?

--- Rabia Basri

O my Lord, if I worship you

O my Lord,

if I worship you
from fear of hell, burn me in hell.

If I worship you
from hope of Paradise, bar me from its gates.

But if I worship you
for yourself alone, grant me then the beauty of your Face.

- by Rabia Basri (Rabia Al-'Adawiyya)