Message To Sinan Antoon

sinan nice creative stimulating text arriving on a sunny bastard gloomy hope evoking and indeed very dark morning that will be spent without remorse capturing evasive iraq while i hit my back with chains the arms sink in water and fingers send a sos message and the eye will arrive to reduce the distance accuse and cheer up agonizing souls do not wait for the song it was sucked into the wind tunnel my deities waiting for grass to green up on the other bank of the river hated green hills presenting the dead all vertically aligned puffing purple smoke their survival kits are in the sinking boat i am still mourning your birds you caught me unaware i never suspected such pain and your birds i mean the doves were those of my father who was a fan of genuine good doves dancing in the air in a sky that has gone and never ever be retrieved for it is not about food and drink it is about heavenly games we played illusions that migrated with their objects no fear more will arrive and this is to be continued i mean the new game not mechanical doves i mean real game we are setting the stage for this is the container the script and the form do not and never try to understand fully sorry it was only an innocent comment on a message thanks sinan

Anwar Al-Ghassani
San José, Thursday, April 24, 2003

What is this, your Baghdad - you ask me

(Remembering Ahlam)

In the thick of the night,
rough mechanics, death events,
were unexpected.
Emotions trickled away from stone;
there were no voyages to extreme planets,
each with its taste of matter and dust.

Crisp were the nights at that home
in “New Baghdad” of my now lost city.
In those nights, all motherly,
my hope for tomorrow’s meetings
with gentle people was ripped off.

I trampled on a desire of the now distant girl.
But what if her offspring trap me
in their ambush and put a bullet in my head;
would that be customary execution
or children, unknowingly, killing their father?

Yielding to the dizzying rotation of her empty days,
she had me abandoned in an attic -
an ancient photo in sepia.

Anwar Al-Ghassani
Jacó, Saturday, February 7, 2004
------------------------------------------
* New Baghdad: a Baghdad suburb.

A Momentary of At-Taji

Recollections On The Morning After, Our Home And Iraq included

Homely thoughts, evaporated ideas
about you being a queen in noisy workshops
where our most adorable selves grow.
You in the neighbourhood of
the hunting lodge and of the other home of thickness,
of dense comfortable colors, deign to talk.
Home, mine, ours; I write its plans
with my head bowed down by archaic grief.
Just in: you and me. Building solutions.
While in the low-intensity war in Tikrit,
after a car bomb explosion,
a not professionally looking fireman,
with a hose of small diameter,
moves dirt, black rubble of a crushed breakfast project,
with a weak jet of water.
A slice of people, I have always appreciated,
is carved out at the speed of lightning.
In the rolling rubble, deformed retinas
conserve this black and white twilight, forced on us;
here, the young past is rolling with metal, wood, pebble.
“Be helpful, son, be helpful!”, do not raise your head
unless you finish your woolen rag in warm saturated colors.
The home is ours, of the tribes;
It is only a vision, a mind´s game;
If it were of matter, I would fear its heavy bearing on earth;
Vision on nocturnal screens, at Kirkuk´s summer cinemas
bursting out of our dream´s substance,
boldly announced and related the day after,
born (I hate this word), as our souls housing in our bodies
come closer and closer to each other in flight;
They touch and get thirsty.
And as always, when I talk of you, of our home, Iraq, Kirkuk, Baghdad, Qalat Salih, Al-Imara, of bombs in Iraq,
of minds planning body slaughtering,
of flesh pieces left behind, show on the street;
always when the improbable happens:
My Mesopotamian deities arrive at the spot,
they are here now, on this dim morning,
cursing and arranging the burials;
always when I underline: death is silly, life is worthwhile;
always when I, through silent loudspeakers, paint your virtual image
(though I prefer you, real, at my reach, dusted with gold);
in such hours, I miss the deadline to add:
My home, is ours, home of the tribes, has no walls;
it is an open space, where we all eat, drink, chat and are very noisy;
half unwillingly we perform prayers, on a rotating stage,
just voices, deep-pitched, unrecognizable;
and love is then the great call:
“We shall return.
We shall return all the archaic goods of equilibrium to ourselves.”
O, I was saying:
In our home no child is left unattended to,
and if you two are to kiss each other, we will have your pixels registered, a flowing image, altering by the hour, conserved and reproduced in endless shades and batches, drawn on cardboards.
To it we will add a hand and an eye that would
monumentally reject the expanding fire waves and flames.
Here, the day after, we entertain not the ease of us,
of us being powerful lovers of light and life protectors;
but rather the secrecy of the beauty of a language,
thought to have been lost and now visibly displayed
in uncommon places: boring cars, café tables, and oh, on the road, on endless paths in your mountains and in arid land expansions, framed by Iraqi date palm trees, in the neighbourhood of your little face of fine features – painful and bitter sweet.

Anwar Al-Ghassani
San José, Tuesday, January 11, 2005

The Comeback

I have been the disguised subject of myself,
will-less, too shy to declare my love
for fear of isolation,
of being restrained and confined.

I now open the channel,
to hear your cries.
Destiny has assigned me
to be your supporting hand.

O, tortured mother,
I am the absent,
your dependent boy.
Take me into your lap,
and give me your drop of acceptance.

Anwar Al-Ghassani
San José, September 24, 2007

Al-Mussal’ lah In Kirkuk 
(The Cemetery And The Plain Beyond)

This land of lively people is real,
not an icon of a land.

The tombstones are real,
their calligraphy eroded, defaced.
The letters are indecipherable,
in transition to become dust.

Nothing resists the wind forever.
Wind is water;
and water is death and rebirth.
Water has no recognition for glory.
Water is oblivion.

Only recent dead have company:
young Macha’s head and body
in two abandoned water wells.
The mother is retrieving him
in her dark room.
Observers under shade,
scan the plain from a distance
and register lazy eagles.
In a zoom in, skulls and bones of lambs
are taken in by an eye.

Wait for spring,
for showers to fall fiercely on new graves.
Yet the dead don’t refresh.
They have no event to care for.
Only for the living, death is an event
destined to be forgotten.

Water will produce its wind,
and when spring is burned out,
the wind will bring the summer sun
to bear on the innocent stone.

Anwar Al-Ghassani
San José, September 24, 2007

Crossing Diyala River At As-Sa’diya On Horseback

Coming from where doves
are hunted and devoured.
From the region of serene beasts and humans,
contented with what is given to them.
At midday, you vertically cross Diyala,
voyaging into the sky.
Your heart beats,
as you imagine lunch in the presence
of faces of bedouin women,
those from a desert garden at sunset,
saturated with aroma of liquid gold.

You enrich yourself by saying,
“This water is light,
its bleaching blue is approaching whiteness.”
Then you are enveloped by its vapor,
wetting raging flames to come
at a faraway horizon.

The horse trots on summery white stones,
the water receives its warm body.
You are looked at by your water;
water you are leaving behind.

At night, in the train compartment,
you loosen, in friendliness, the grip
of the sudden fever;
your water comes back
and reaches your forehead.

Anwar Al-Ghassani
San José, October 7, 2007

Iraq’s Poem Of Defiance

I shed numbered tears on my dead.
My plains intercept the falling darkness.

I call you back:

Obtain my space as hope.
Prepare your reminiscences
for oblivion and clemency.

Your homes have shades,
silent, fresh, illuminated
under summer’s midday gloom.

Your rich and stern features are eager to deliver
mighty inclination and feasts under trees
and water nearby swinging its fish.

Those eager eyes of female just born
would care for children and men
under my sun and days
you will wish they never end.

Feed each other in my timelessness;
remember my springs,
humid as your voluptuous nights.

Don’t hesitate to expose your chests to the hot wind.
Repair your broken selves,
expand beyond shattered panes.
Remember me in your bodies, your bless.

Anwar Al-Ghassani
San José, November 7, 2007

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