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

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

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

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