Iraq's Night is Long - Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish: Iraq's Night is Long

 

Aug 09 2013by Sinan Antoon سنان انطون

[Mahmoud Darwish. Image from tahrirnews.com]

[Today marks the fifth anniversary of Mahmoud Darwish’s death.]

Iraq’s Night is Long

Mahmoud Darwish

[For Saadi Youssef]

Iraq, Iraq is blood the sun cannot dry

The sun is God’s widow above Iraq

The murdered Iraqi says to those standing at the bridge:

Good Morning, I am still alive.

They say: You are still a dead man searching for his grave

in the corners of cooing

Iraq, Iraq . . . Iraq’s night is long

Dawn breaks only to the murdered

praying half a prayer and never finishing a greeting to anyone

For the Mongols are coming

from the gate of the Caliph’s palace

at the river’s shoulder

The river runs south and carries our dead who stay up,

carries them to the palm trees’ relatives.

Iraq, Iraq is cemeteries that are open, like schools,

to everyone:

Armenian, Turkmen, and Arab. We are all equal in eschatology

There must be a poet who wonders:

Baghdad; How many times will you disappoint myths?

How many times will you make statues for tomorrow?

How many times will you seek to marry the impossible?

Iraq, Iraq, here prophets stand

unable to utter the sky’s name

Who is killing whom in Iraq now?

Victims are shards on the roads and in words

Their names, like their bodies, are bits of disfigured letters

Here prophets stand together unable to utter

the sky’s name and the name of the murdered

Iraq, Iraq. So who are you in the presence of suicide?

I am not I in Iraq. Nor are you you

He is none but another

God has abandoned the perplexed, so who are we?

Who are we? We are nothing but a predicate in the poem:

Iraq’s night is long

Long!

[Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon from Athar al-Farasha (Beirut: Riyad El-Rayyes, 2008)]