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Faleeha Hassan Mar 2023
To be a refugee
Means you walk with a mute dignity
And because the touch has a memory, you can no longer make another one,
No sea can reveal to you the joy of its flowing and its every wave is shackled with corpses and identities of drowned people, no land will welcome your shy steps.
To be a refugee  
You have to wear a stainless smile in front of their serrated gaze.
You have to get rid of your ancient history,
Your mother's prayer for your safety, which no longer works
The wisdom of your ancestors, which they left to you before they disappeared into their graves.
To be like me,  
You have to peel off your skin, pull out your tongue in order to get along with the crowds that are waiting for any slight movement from you to finish you off.
Above you have to be very sane in the streets that know nothing but where madness erupts,
And like swimming in a river of blood, you will remain stained until the end.
Faleeha Hassan
Faleeha Hassan Nov 2020
Regardless of the fact that I will die like everything on this Earth
And my body will become fertilizer for the trees
Or
Some of it will stick in the tires of cars
Or
Maybe hungry birds will crave pieces of meat and attack my body with their beaks
I will become abandoned rubble
Brooms will kick me from one garbage can to another
I say:
Despite all the bad thoughts that may grow in my head
If I didn’t love you, would I survive?
Faleeha Hassan Sep 2019
Two soldiers
Let's celebrate
Let us run to that hill
Let us climb up the remains of that tank and sing
Let us drink tea under this burned tree
Smoke our last cigarettes
It is not every day that the war can make dead bodies and we are not with them
Faleeha Hassan Sep 2019
I'm crying
Not because you squeezed my heart and threw it like a sponge into desert,
Yes, I'm crying but not because you did not smile at me
but your teeth look whiter than white when you saw a woman's shadow pass you,
Yes, I'm crying but not because you are completely healed and no longer need my whisper to sleep,
Not because you dedicated all the poems you wrote to me
To another woman and she stupidly believed you,
I'm crying but not because I threw my pillow and I will be Watchful all my life without you,
Yes, I'm crying deeply
because the Ice cream has melted before I got home and I didn't enjoy eating it.
Faleeha Hassan Sep 2019
When I drink tea in New Jersey
  Like a girl who writes poetry about a boy she has never seen My day sits with all this disappointment
  Counting her fleeting moments
I remember my mother using the smell of onions
To shed her tears in the kitchen
For the absence of my father
Who climbed his life war by war
  Whenever he wore his military belt
  He wished that war was just an old shoe
He could take it off whenever he liked
And he didn't need to think of fixing it at the cobbler's shop
I remember my brother
Who asked in his letters--
When will the war understand that we are not good at dealing with death?  I remember us forty years ago
  We were kids, very much kids
With colorful clothes and hearts
  It was enough for us to see a balloon
To drown in big laughter    I remember all this now  When I drink my tea
  And
I practice my loneliness.
Faleeha Hassan Sep 2019
Oh, Faleeha
How brilliant is your future
I whisper in my ear
And pat my shoulder
Every morning
I open my day with a big lie
I tell myself
Faleeha
leave the news to the promoters of rumors
And the houses being bombed by skilled pilots
They will be rebuilt immediately afterward
Leave Iraqi women to be sold in the Sbaya Bazaar in Mosul
Mothers will give birth to other daughters nine months later
Don’t worry about the man who sells his life for a handful of coins under the sweltering sun
One day he will be able to get a Chinese umbrella  
Don’t worry about your niece whose face now being eaten by skin cancer
She will get through Photoshop a wonderful picture for her profile on Facebook  
Why do you look so long at picture of your friend who is missing from Kuwait war?
He is lucky
He survived the darkness of grave
Oh, Faleeha
Leave the children of Baghdad to wake up to violent explosions
Music is no longer fit for their mornings
Write down the martyrs names on a piece of a paper and place it in your old coat and leave it in the closet
Or send it to the dry cleaners
I’m tired of counting the names of the martyrs and the war never ends
Faleeha
Don’t plan for the future
It is as a close as   a ******’s bullet
Yes,
I open my day with a big
Big
Big lie
But no lie can cover the scary truth
Faleeha Hassan Sep 2019
Oh, my god
This poem!
Whenever I try to make her stand on the reality line
She flutters like Marilyn Monroe’s dress in the imaginations of men
I tell her to keep herself on one meaning
But she defies me
While wearing the interpretation mask
And when she tries to describe the battlefield
She is looking for the effects of kisses
On the collars of the soldiers who are tied down in their trenches
With fear and hopelessness
But if they were to be blown up
And their bodies were every where
Her words would be meaningless
For she hiding behind symbolism
She can’t sense the children’s horror from the bombs
And their attempts to huddle against the remnants of destroyed walls
Her cheeks do not hurt
Like mothers’ cheeks dried of their hot tears poured while waiting for deferred letters from their absent sons
She does not take the risk of thinking
So, she can’t believe any truth
She does not pay attention to my damaged life
Which has been crushed by the harsh machine of days
She is trying to make her words beautiful
So, she sprinkles rose water on an erupting volcano
She is too comfortable with death and even praises him
She is summarizing all this loss, darkness, combustion, destruction, chemical weapons. black banners, coffins, skinning , deprivation, orphanages, curfews, warning, sirens, barbed wire, tanks, thrumming of planes, explosions. ******. blood shed on the side walk, death, ashes, displacement, emptiness, charred bodies, mass graves, coffins, body traps, yelling, sadness, anger, hunger, thirst, vigilance, slapping …. etc.
She summarizes all of this in one ward
War
While I am, the poet stand in the middle
Watching my body jump from death to death
For nothing
Just to let the poem come
But after all this trouble
She only comes imperfectly
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