Poems by the Iraqi poet Ali Rashid
1- Defeats
Each night I count my defeats.
I scatter the sack of defeats before my eyes, just to hang them
on the line of talk allowing them to ferment.
One morning I chatter like a child braided by air.
The night is too heavy when opening my sacks
to show me those defeats my soul never touched.
2- Fragility
Alone she knows
I have a heart that must mend its fragility by forgetting.
I have a greedy life motivating me with seduction.
Alone she knows
the happiness she anticipates is thin
like a cloud that has been shattered by failure,
a cloud ushering us to far away creeks — We have to drain their waters off with rusty dreams.
3- Solitude
That who I was, is not you?
What glazed your eyes with sadness, and peppered your face with ash?
Oh “Ali Rashid”, I wish I could go back a handful
of years prior to that moment. Replacing ages with what I
had been.
But I have to mend the scene, cropping my own sins which swap doubt with faith.
To prevent the war from chewing my years again,
or the foreignness that fashions me with its grim, alienated dress — eating up what is left of time.
4- The Skies
The sky that is above me,
The sky that is under me,
and the sky that fills my suitcases with passion —
do not fit any more, do not fit me, I who escaped a country its skies used to roar with airplanes.
Countries accumulate us like war salvage, to count later in
defeat.
5- Oh My God
Oh my God,
We are the children of destruction and ruined cities.
What do we gain from our lives?
You planted us like being-seeds dried out between your hands
then you threw us out carelessly — we grew like fodder for your cattle. But if a land went dry in Levant
or if soils turned, lodged in Baghdad
our blood becomes your drinking water.
Oh my God,
Why do you feast on our lives?
There are your soldiers harvesting our necks in your name,
while gossip makers accumulate our bodies stitched with
bullets In their houses
as we are the vintage of their hate.
Do hearts get contaminated and virginity deteriorate in this way?
Does seduction grow wilder like this?
Then we have been hunted by bullets like terrified antelopes creeping towards your wisdom.
Do we scatter similarly like being — — your sin where your hand is dipped in its ash
When you wiped out with bitter blackness the brows of
mothers?
Oh my God,
We are your sticky children full of death, but we do not want anything except graves — we recognize in them our shattered limbs.
6- We’ll say goodbye
We’ll say goodbye
while our eyes are wet with dreams that raced us to bed and sleep,
drinking its coffee without us.
…
We’ll say goodbye
While counting up cold years
Peeling what remained of them.
….
We’ll say goodbye
Getting out of last evening
accompanied with a handful of sticky wishes, and glasses we had not touched yet
just to receive tomorrow over and over again.
….
We’ll say goodbye
While no space is left to turn time idle with forgetfulness.
About the Poet
Ali Rashid is an Iraqi visual artist and poet. He lives in the Netherlands. He studied in Iraq, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and Spain. He had participated in numerous exhibitions across Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Among his many publications are Maps Dyed with Fear (poetry, Damascus, 2003), Picture of the Last Dinner (play, Damascus, 2005), Drowned Men Plowing the White (poetry, Jordan, 2020). In his writing he exhibits a deep and strange complicated nostalgia, but not a part of his past memory. Instead he creates his past as a dead or absent present.
translated from Arabic by Saleh Razzouk & Scott Minar
