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

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?

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

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.

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

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

After forty years of snow
Do you remember the watch you gave to me wrapped in a poem?
It is still bound to my soul's meaning
The more time passes
The more the letters jump into my heart artery
My heart is now pumping flirtation
How many times I have wished
That if my city were not surrounded by graves
Then like a little girl  
I would wait for you in a secret garden
Come on!
Take off this thick absence
As thick as a New Jersey coat in the winter time
Melt off the snow that has stacked on the lines of your messages
Mow the grass that has grown on your tongue
Don’t save a sea of tears for me
I am not a mermaid
Make yourself present with words
Woo me
Let me stop demanding my rights
And thrive by the touch of your fingers as they play with my hair
Let me fool myself again
And see you as center of my universe

When I try to write
I sense that millions of readers are
Crowding the paper’s edge,
Kneeling, genuflecting, and lifting their hands
To pray for my poem’s safe arrival.
The moment it looms on my imagination’s horizon,
Gazing at the concept in a diaphanous gown of metaphor,
Young people smack their lips—craving double entendres.
Meanwhile, with piercing glances, the elderly scrutinize
Its juxtapositions and puns.
Then the concept smiles shyly, dazed at seeing them.
On the paper’s lines both young and old meet for a discussion,
But my words resist
And ***** walls of critical theories.
Then the paths of personal confession contract,
Contract,
Contract.
My imagination calmly shuts down,
And the conception retreats inside my head.
At that hour, it afflicts my world with
Bouts of destruction.  
Workers refuse their paychecks.
Farmer let their fields go fallow.
Women stop chatting.
Pregnant mothers refuse to deliver their babies.
Children collect their holiday presents but
Toss them on the interstate.
Our rulers detest their positions.
Kings sell their crowns at yard sales.
Geography teachers rend their world map
And throw it in the waste basket.
Grammar teachers hide vowel marks in the drop ceiling
And break caesura by striking the blackboard.
Flour sacks split themselves open, and the flour mixes with dirt.
Birds smash their wings and stop flying.
Mice swarm into the mouths of hungry cats.
Currency sells itself at public auctions.
The streets carry off their asphalt under their arms
And flee to the nearest desert.
Time forgets to strike the hour.
The sea becomes furious at the wave
And leaves the fish stuck headfirst in the mud.
The shivering moon hides its body in the night’s cloak.
Rainstorms congeal in the womb of the clouds.
The July sun hides in holes in the ozone layer,
Allowing ice to form on its beard and scalp.
Skyscrapers beat their heads against the walls,
Terrified by the calamity.
Cities dwindle in size till they enter the needle’s eye.
Mountains tumble against each other.
My room squeezes in upon me, and
The ceiling conspires against me with
The walls,
The chair,
The table,
The fan,
The floor,
Glass in the frame,
The windows,
Its curtains,
My clothes, and
My breaths.
The world’s clarity is roiled.
Atomic units change.
I vanish into seclusion,
Trailing behind me tattered moans and
Allowing my pen to slay itself on the white paper.

Tonight
When I entered my apartment
The stairs were lying like tired men after a hard day's work
The door a yawning mouth
My TV was listening intently to the sports newscast
And
Like a ******* woman, the couch was sitting on the floor  
Hardly breathing the used air
The curtain tickled the cheek of the window……
Swaying gracefully above
My books slept like babies on the hands of the bookshelves
The dining table was listening to the whispers of her chairs
The lamps were winking at to each other
The fan was busy flailing her arms indifferent
In my apartment
The life looks the same as I left it  
Everything is normal
No,  
It is more than normal
Strange…….
No one missed me?

When longing becomes madness
And everything is silenced but my heart,

I tiptoe in fear that my eyes may see me.
I tiptoe into your clothes
In my anger toward
You I neglected them.

I brush off the dust of desire.
I smell them
Searching for your dew
or a drop of your scent.

I press between the muscles of your shirt
To quiet my pains
And regain the balance of my soul

So free me from my vows
Because I often do this.

The Mother she waves farewell to her son now how getting ready to go to the war,
And the soldier he was running down towards the gate of the war,
And I a little girl watching from my window my grandmother shed tears when she waves farewell to my father and I sigh for them.

Every time my father is late from the front line
Sickness strikes my mother
and I tour with her the hospitals of Najaf.

I write to him ‘come back to us now,
Make your sergeant read my words: I am about to die’.

He returns my letter, laughing:
‘We are the amusement of the blindman’.

Oh, you River of Jasim, you tore my years
Between my father’s assumed victories
And my mother’s wishes in the emergency room;

They used to plant hope in her mind
By sticking on the glass door,
Two notices confirming: (awaiting death certificate).

Her heart ages so fast
And I ***** from hearing the chants.
Every time the presenter says ‘Victory is on the horizon’,

My grandmothers’ eyes rise to the ceiling -
She hides a mocking smile.

With rage I scream at the screen ‘no victory’s coming’.

She whispers: ‘god is generous’.
‘You sound like my father when I asked for new toys’.
She quietens and we contend,
Awaiting his return before a new battle,
Fearing that a last fight may end the life of a dove.

Far from the possibility of my death – like the rest of people –
And the body becomes compost for a tree
Some of it attaches to the wheels of a car
Or a bird feels greed for a piece of meet
So it leaps with its beak toward me…

Or the street cleaners sweep it along
I become as good as abandoned debris

Or the broom could strike me to the pile to burn
I say:
Far from the thoughts grow in the pathways of the head
If I didn’t find you
Would I have survived?

Between two wars you came.
You mediated
And lit the fire of a new love.

And we began to spread ourselves between two suns
One for me
And the other for your eyes when the roads vanished
And we only fell out over the A
When it wanted to insert itself
Between the W and R.

We told each other I love you.
The wars are made beautiful with songs.
The songs wipe the blood from the wars’ lips.

We’re never far from its grip.
We can exchange with it our stay
And I was as I always was
Loving your letters and always want them.

You, my soul mate,
You, the voice of my voice,
You, the dotting and un-dotting of my letters
the teacher says:
she would remove my sorrows
and heal my tender soul?
I said:
I will make flowers of you;
And I had forgotten the greenness of an evening,
after the drought of my femininity.
Return to me then
So that we can hate this imposter
This idiot
The image is like a blonde
Forgotten by the aged.
Forgetting that our sky
Is black despite his existence,
And red despite his clinging to the tails of a dubious morning’s veil
Come back
So we can hate him
This traitor
Over the uniformed streets he looms like a policeman watching.
My finger tips and your fingertips
Come back again,
So I can show you my essence
I your notebook
Come back to me then,
So I can tell the apples in the basket
Like they told me about you.
translated by Dikra Ridha

I gathered the pores of my being
And came to perfume them with your own fragrance
Only to discover that you are an oleander -- a rosebay
While in the memory of unease and apprehension
I trace some features that resemble no one but you
An image has its own dimensions
And, when hopelessness assails me, I have roads
That never cease to pull and lead me toward you
And while in the nook of anxiety
I fancy a preordained timing
For events that never materialize
The image draws near
And I talk to it
About the tons of heavy separation
That oppress the seasons of my life
I have recited you as rain
Yet your lightning never came near me
Alienation gathered thick
Translated by Mahmoud Abbas Masoud

A Babylonian once told me:
When my name bores me,
I throw it in the river
And return renewed!
* * * * *
Basra existed
Even before al-Sayyab* viewed its streets
Bathed in poetry
As verdant as
A poet’s heart when her
Prince pauses trustfully to sing
While sublime maidens dance--
Brown like mud in the orchards
Soft like mud in the orchards
Scented with henna like mud in the orchards—
And a poem punctuates each of their pirouettes as
They walk straight to the river.
I’ve discovered no place in the city broader than Five Mile.
He declared:
I used to visit there night and day,
When sun and moon were locked in intimate embrace.
Then they quarreled.
The Gulf’s water was sweet,
Each ship would unload its cargo,
And crew members enjoyed a bite of an apple
And some honey.
The women were radiant;
So men’s necks swiveled each time ladies’ shadows
Moved beneath the palms’ fronds.
These women needed no adornment;
Translated by William Hutchins
……………………………………………………………..
Basra, also written Basrah  is the capital of Basra Governorate, located on the Shatt al-Arab river in southern Iraq between Kuwait and Iran. It had an estimated population of 1.5 million of 2012.
Basra is also Iraq's main port, although it does not have deep water access, which is handled at the port of Umm Qasr.
The city is part of the historic location of Sumer, the home of Sinbad the Sailor, and a proposed location of the Garden of Eden. It played an important role in early Islamic history and was built in 636 AD or 14 AH. It is Iraq's second largest and most populous city after Baghdad.
Basra is consistently one of the hottest cities on the planet, with summer temperatures regularly exceeding 50 °C (122 °F)
Badr Shakir al Sayyab (December 24, 1926 – 1964) was an Iraqi and Arab poet. Born in Jekor, a town south of Basra in Iraq, he was the eldest child of a date grower and shepherd.
He graduated from the Higher teachers training college of Baghdad in 1948
Badr Shakir was dismissed from his teaching post for being a member of the Iraqi Communist Party.
Badr Shakir al-Sayyab was one of the greatest poets in Arabic literature, whose experiments helped to change the course of modern Arabic
poetry. At the end of the 1940s he launched, with Nazik al-Mala'ika,and shortly followed by ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī and Shathel Taqa, the free verse movement and gave it credibility with the many fine poems he published in the fifties.
These included the famous "Rain Song," which was instrumental in drawing attention to the use of myth in poetry. He revolutionized all the elements of the poem and wrote highly involved political and social poetry, along with many personal poems.

My innocence nudges me
As she points to the creases of my bedding on the ground.

While the bed itself, with the imbecility of its sheets,
Lies rejected in the corner of the room.

My parents’ smiles widen with the stupidity of the covers.

They alone, and the bed
proved to me my innocence and the idiocy of a tidy bed.

Even if I inherited the furniture, children
And the creases under the eyes,

Every time my bed rubs in the carpet’s weave,
I am still baffled by the wideness of their smiles,

As I lie between my children
On a stupid, tidy bed.

By Faleeha Hassan
Translated by Dikra Ridha

© Copyright 2016, by Faleeha Hassan. All rights reserved under the Copyright laws of the United States of America and international copyright agreements.  No portion of this book maybe reproduced in any form, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author.    Email:  d.fh88@yahoo.com

I would have sneaked
In from the pores of a net.

I would have wrapped you in a prose
Poem that lacks precision and laid you to sleep
Under the covers of my bed.
Quietly.

So if love was to engulf me
And a longing rises from my soul
I would stretch the fingers of my hand towards
you  and dabble with the words of the poem,
Letter by letter.

If I was truly a poet
I would have limped to the Lord by now
And sat by the foot of his throne
And held on to it
With both hands
And whispered: ‘you are the Greatest,
most Beautiful, most Wonderful and Capable,
Will you create a lover for me?’

I mean only for me.

But I know
That my prayer will not be answered
Not because it is impossible.
More than that really,
Since I have never known
A man
Who has never betrayed his lover.
*******
Translated by Dikra Ridha



© Copyright 2016, by Faleeha Hassan. All rights reserved under the Copyright laws of the United States of America and international copyright agreements.  No portion of this book maybe reproduced in any form, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author.    Email:  d.fh88@yahoo.com

Shortly before my father died, he whispered to me longingly: “Daughter, treasure this, because it authenticates your heritage to our kinsfolk!”  When I accepted this object, I discovered it was a stone with inscriptions I did not understand and delicate, mysterious lines.  He continued, “It is a keepsake from our great-great grandfather and can ultimately be traced back to Bilal, the Holy Prophet’s first muezzin, and his father, who was the king of Ethiopia.”  I accepted this small heirloom, which I carried everywhere with me in my handbag.  The person who shared my life under the title of “husband,” however, threw it down the drain at our house, thinking—as he told me—that it was a fetish.  From then till now I have endured successive exiles.  So I wrote this poem to explain the secret of my skin color—given that I am a native of al-Najaf, Iraq—spiritually, mournfully, and poetically!

My father said: “You were born quite unexpectedly,
Remote from Aksum, like a beauty spot for al-Najaf—‘the ******’s Cheek.’
Your one obsession has been writing, but
The sea will run dry before you arrive at the meaning of meaning.”
He affirmed: “During a pressing famine,
I devoted myself to watching over every breath you took.  
I would ****** my hand through the film of hope
To caress your spirit with bread.
You would burp, and
I would delightedly endure my hunger and fall asleep.
I could only find the strength to fib to your face and say I was happy.
I would feel devastated when you fidgeted,
Because you would always head toward me,
And I felt helpless.”
Aksum!  They say you’re far away!
“No, it’s closer to you than your exile.”
“And now?”
“Don’t talk about ‘now’ while we’re living it.”
“The future depresses me.  How can I proceed?”
How can the ear be deaf to the wailing from the streets?
Aksum, you have colored my skin.  Al-Najaf has freshened my spirit.
She knows and does the opposite.
She knows that I inter only dirt above me, and
That I deny everything except spelling out words:
M: Mother, who went walking down the alley of no return.
F: Father, who hastened after her.
B: Brother, who never earned that title.
S: Sister who buttoned her breast to a loving tear, no matter how fake.
………………….There’s no one I care about!
The trees tremble some times, and we don’t ask why.
My life surrounds me the way prison walls surround suspects;
I am the victim of a building erected by a frightened man.
With its talons time scratches its tales on me,
And I transform them into a silent song
Or, occasionally, a psalm of sobs.
Father, do you believe that--the roots have been torn asunder?
Fantasies began to carry me from al-Najaf to Afyon
And from Afyon to nonexistence,
Yellow teeth stretching all the way.
“History’s not anything you’ve made,”
One American neighbor tells another.
He’s surprised to see me.
“Who are you?” he asks when he doesn’t believe his eyes.
Would he understand the truth of my origin if I told him I was born in al-Najaf
Or that Aksum has veiled my face?
I have walked and walked and walked.
I’m exhausted, Father.
Is your child mine?
Show yourself and return me to the purity of your *****.
Allow me to occupy the seventh vertebra of fantasy!
Don’t eject me into a time I don’t fit.
I need you.
I ask you:
Has my Lord forbidden me to be happy?
Am I forbidden to preserve
What I have left
And sit some warm evening
Averting my ear from a voice that doesn’t interest me?
Answer me, Father!
Or change the face of our garden
So it changes . . . .to what they believe!
Translated by William Hutchins

During moments I yearned for forests grown for me alone,
Caressing them in a dream,
I could sense the throbbing of the heart
Hidden beneath my ribs to bless my journey.
Summoning me with a pulse that he recognizes in me.
I heard the noise of abandoned smoke from a moment of care
Join with me,
Forcefully traversing desires to the hidden-most one.
My spirit swung toward him,
Creating a tingling
On lips that devour breaths alive.
I felt ashamed,
But the eye,
In moments—I scarcely know what to call them—that took me on another route
Toward the television, saw warplanes . . . spray death on them.
At that moment,
The fire of machine guns raked all the bodies,
And another fire raked my body when I trained my eye on him
Hesitantly inclining his head
Toward a shoulder unaccustomed to the secret of the stars of war
Or to insomnia.
Oh . . . . I leaned on it!
And when he caressed a dumbfounded person
I felt his fingers like coiling embers inside me.
Bashfulness seized the excuse this caress gave . . . and vanished,
Eliminating distance till the two of us were one.
And the eye—he moaned: May love not forgive her the eye—repeated another evasion
Toward a drizzle of men flung about in the air by just the rustling of a pilot penetrating a building
To fall on screens as the debris of breaking news.
But his breaths . . . shattering the still down of the cheek,
And turning their picture into mist as
Eddies of the screen’s corpses . . . varieties of death that they brought them.
The spirit that became a body,
The body that was sold for the sake of a touch,
The eye that was concealed in his image
And that approached the firebrand of conflagrations.
Everyone drawing close to everyone,
Everyone,
Everyone,
Everyone.
But the thunder of their machine guns splintered them:
Corpses piled on corpses,
I mean on me,
The eyes of those in it were extinguished.
They slept in a trench of silence.
My eyes’ lids parted in a wakefulness obsessed with them.
I rose … and embraced the chill
That the screens brought me in commemoration of Stalingrad.
………………………………
Translated by William Hutchins

I d like to come to you
But, our streets are red
And I do not have
But my white dress.

Spare Flower    

The African night is beautiful,
In fact, it is divine’
Says the lady, visiting Iraq.
So I announce
I am the one leaving with your ignorance,
With minimum skin and a fractured soul.
The city is an adjective
And I have only my words.

This life eliminates the vocal paths from your being.
There is only departure
And my name was fitted to me.
I became the trustee of verse,
The spare flower;
The one talented in what has not yet been written.
No.
It never was
And never will be
That I form poems for you,
Grow them inside you,
Or write them in coercion.
So beat as you wish.
I am done with living in denial
I choose another life.
Madam,
my bed and the graveyard of my joy;
I crave with my longing the scent of water
but its stench pushes me away
to the gloom of the snow of Afyon,
the coughing of its chimneys,
the doubts of its elderly’s stumbling steps,
and squeals of the bones of trees
.
Translated by Dikra Ridha

Afyon is a town in the mountains of Turkey; it is where the poet was exiled.
…………………………

It is published in (ScreaminMams) magazine march 2016
© Copyright 2016, by Faleeha Hassan. All rights reserved under the Copyright laws of the United States of America and international copyright agreements.  No portion of this book maybe reproduced in any form, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author.    Email:  d.fh88@yahoo.com

I loved my grandmother,
But she devoted herself to the family.
I loved my mother,
But she devoted herself to my father.
I loved my father,
But he devoted himself to the war!