treasure in the wolf’s mouth!

Ahmed Abdul Hussein
(Iraq)

Translated by: Khalida Hamid

Ahmed Abdul HusseinLet Your lantern, that utters with miracles, lit the name of Iraq. Take off Your tatter with which You wrapped Baghdad face. Collect the ornaments of war from the doorways. Make their guns sweepers lest they kill or be killed. Blow Your lamp that spreads darkness in my mother’s night and don’t let my sweetheart go, frightened, from home to the university and from the university to home. But make her heart impervious with Your remotest star in order she knows – while she tightens her veil for You – that You are the tempest that eventually smiled after long devastation.
You horrified my baby’s heart and the time has come for her to touch Your heart.

As for Your angles wandering from Zakho to Fao; the masked angles with paws and canine teeth, return them with their explosive belts to the desert and grant them a thirst well from which they drink forever.
 And if our women came to You with their baskets full of the fruits of their wombs, don’t fill them with Your ration card’s thorns and breed of humiliation, but with a little a little of what You kept in the treasuries of Your hidden, invisible transcendence. Fill them with the flavor of dawn and with the flickers of white birds flapping their wings at Evening Prayer. Make their eyes immersed with Kohl and their hearts with babies’ laughers lest be distracted from praying to You by the names of their sons; the ones who died and the ones who fled.
Oh well of thirst!
Lead the hoopoe; the hoopoe of our Mi’dan fathers, to the fountain of secret air because the feet of their souls have been broken in grieve at it.
 
Make the mountains of the Kurds gold and their waterfalls silver because they since 1988 did not complete the recitation of Your Quran, oh God; whenever they reach Al-Anfal Sura they die and their women are sold in Al-Anbar.
 
Now then…,
 
You ordered us to seed the bones of our children and said that wait for the harvest. We waited and it did not come; the Arabs and an Arab Quran full of animal diseases had came.
Here You are looking at the Assyrian weeping over the ruins of his church, the Rafidite bloodstained in Kerbala’ and the Manda’i calling for help with water that will be dried with the sun of strangers.
 
Look.
We are about to extinct.
Oh our black treasure!
Oh well of thirst!
 
You horrified our hearts
and the time has come for us to touch Your heart;
Your ancient heart that we read in the books.

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