Baghdad

Her bridges are in school textbooks, Her dead are numbers in the papers. Every tourist wears black. In a dream, I visited her once too; I saw a friend drinking his tears In a tea-cup, and he smiled. I saw a crow that covered the clouds with its wings and I saw a graveyard in the garden of Maydan. So where are the poets, and the photographs, Fairuz? This is Tigris sleeping on a stretcher, Besieged by soldiers and wishes. And when I crossed the bridge to Rusaffa, The search point spat in face. I was woken by a shot to the head.