POEMS
Salah Faik
On the Tenth Anniversary of Murdering my Country
My country disappeared without a funeral
Because it shunned the beauty of palm trees
It avoided its marshes
Thought that mountains were secrets
They looted the tablets of the first kingdom
with gigantic ships
Now they are covered with spiders
Its springs, fruit, and books
are scattered among hills of salt
Untitled
After months of pain
I took x-rays of my chest
The images astonished me:
Moroccans dancing
A Jew from my childhood
is selling fabric in an alley
Charlie Chaplin is sitting with my father in the guestroom
Where father hid his clean dinars
Children are watching a man from the countryside cry in the market
I am waiting outside an airport
Even though it is closed
There are animals, some of them wild, scattered in these images
I sit among them and read a short story
From Bears at a Funeral
I, too, will go to the hereafter
with a tiny chair
*
He who lives in these pages
was struck by an earthquake in one of the poems
Masked men looting a museum appeared
Peasants attacking a well
A poet eating numbers in the shade of a tree
There were rocks and water
in that poem
*
Prophets should be forced to walk
or dance on the Straight Path
I will sit there
in my little chair
and watch
*
It is time to receive my last guest;
Me
I am waiting for him at an airport right now
From When Winged Bulls Fly
Night comes to my room at night
I place my poems before it
I scatter clouds around it
and rearrange the scene
Of migrants in a minefield
*
When the echoes of distant feasts reach me
From a land that is burnt
I bank my table with an old man’s fist
I have saved a few words I speak with
and greet those waiting at a station
in the morning
*
From a house
that is no longer in any place
I stepped toward unknowns
I sunbathe now
Between boats
abandoned by desperate fishermen
*
In a beautiful countryside
There is an old abandoned train
Blind men singing around it
Their palms bloody
From knocking at the doors
From A River Escaping a City
Half poems in my mouth
Long silence tires me
I have walked in processions
for dead military men
Because I love music
*
It is spring in Kirkuk now
The days when narcissus is a guest to the fields
I am always travelling there
I never arrive
*
Finally Godot arrived
I met him at a newsstand
A silent nightingale
Was looking at him
[Translated frpm the Arabic by Sinan Antoon]
[Salah Faik (Kirkuk, Iraq, July, 1945-) is an Iraqi poet. He worked in journalism in Iraq and abroad after leaving. HE has lived in London and the Philipines. He has published six collections of poetry in Arabic. His most recent collection, Dubaba fi Ma’tam (Bears at a Funeral) was just published by Dar al-Jamal (Beirut/Baghdad) The first two poems translated here are unpublished, but are translated from the poet’s Facebook page with his permission].