Your love has tortured me
O home like a tattoo on the heart
Your love has bettered me
Dragged me ... East and West
Playing with kites as a kid
I was
Playing with marbles and the spinning top
by the riverside
Counting the types of butterflies
And the kinds of Palm-trees
and lost between the Sayer and Barhi1
I was a kid with eyes like grass
Wide like a plain
with a wooden horse
and a sword of wood
Dreaming of pirates, seas and ports
of women like chocolate and boxes of gold
My home, if you would know, no other home looked like it
And since birth, I did not look like any other kid
In our alley where children looked like the Morningstar
I used to strut, dressed as the Batman
Proud of my bruise and wound
Then we got the Sultan’s dogs
Haunting us
seizing from us our freedom,
My canvas, and the colors.
A stranger I was in my home
slapping me with the smell of gunpowder
the screams of pain
and the curses of the warden
***
The Garden of Eden was my home
until they came in the name of God
from a desert that has no features but the dunes
A desert that does not know the meaning of
Love
or the meaning of God
or the human being
They hijacked my home
Stole a history of gold
Stole my pencils and the painting brush
They stole my dreams and my eyes
Then they took me as a captive
To the battlefield
a dust of Khaki
a uniform of Khaki
a weapon of Khaki
and wars reproduce like ants
a failed war ... gives birth to another war
***
In the beginning
During the exile inside the home
They took out my eyes and put them in a drawer
They took my heart and hid it in a drawer
Took our Palm-tree
The Nabuk-tree
The cat of my neighbor’s sweet daughter “Bazoon”
They took my joy
My mother’s laugh and my father supplicates
They took our neighborhood’s streets
The Shanasheel*2 and night tales
The daughters of the Tawashat*3 collecting the dates
And the boat boys gathering the fishing nets
That are loaded “Pregnant” with Gattans*4 and Shabbouts*5
They took my house
And my time sleeping under the moon
They took the warmth
The eyes of my girlfriends
And the friends who died in the distance
Out of oppression
they took the two rivers
Arak al- Zhlawi*6
The Barbn and Hilawi*7
the forests of Palm-trees
Took the painting brushes
They took me from myself
and from my history
from a country that gives life and death
Like the rain
they took all of life’s joys
to start over once again, the third and tenth time, from scratch
***
My home that I’ve left “just in body” in the hands of the outsiders
and the hand of the Arabizeds
An easy home ... A difficult home
A path getting out of a path
A heart entering into a heart
My home, Hey you foreigner
Umayyad … Abbasid*8
Mountain fellow … Nihilist
Is a child chilling in the heat
Burning in the cold
Slaughtered by
The horse’s man
The vulgar
The mule’s man
The pimp
The illiterate
The Bedouin
In the name of the nation and the name of the people
***
Away from you my home
I’m haunted by
A daily dream
Where I see myself lying down
Next to your grave, Oh Mom
*6:Arak al- Zhlawi. Iraqi local liquor out of dates *7:The Barbn and Hilawi. Two kinds of Iraqi dates *8:Umayyad … Abbasid. Two Arab Muslims empires that mistreated Native Iraqis (Chaldeans) as well as other Christian & minorities.
SPECIAL THANKS Wholehearted thanks is extended to
My friends and associates who assisted with proofreading
My poems in English:
Daniel T. Ames, (Life Wins,
The Temple of Sorrows, Good Morning Me,
Wounding the Dark, & Fleeing Paradise) Ira C. Houck, & Weam Namou,
(September Rain) Salaam Mishkoor, (Shatha’s Garden,
A Woman From Above,
East Memoir, &
T-Wall’s City)