The Needle House

The Needle’s House Waiting For the Third Time Out Arabic Poem by: Salah Hassan * Translated into English by: Inaam Al-Hashimi (Gold_N_Silk) ====== Between me and me there is a civil war! It’s my war alone; I will wash away the speech And cross the language barrier I will resign from the verbal job And write my name in the manuscript of annihilation I will describe you, O war O my war! From the skies of drought and indifference I will look down on the atlas of blood With a bird’s eye look As a hawk breathing storms Because the hot red color Covers the map. My health is a candle But I am the wind’s begotten child The truth is not free The error is not a slave I will get out of the house of the needle To free the horizon of its windows And leave the thunder blabbering Till the Euphrates gets flooded And drown the Ziggurat and the gods. This is my nation It’s not a part of the world But rather a transient in it Its memory is a cemetery It is a stranger to happiness It doesn’t dream As it doesn’t sleep And if it did It would In a coffin. I will describe you, O war! O my war! I will write you I will paint you I will mummify you I will translate you I will use you to lure traders, Odepians, Psychopaths And schizophrenics. So that you will be all done; I want you to get out of my language So I can write A text free of terror. That’s the continuous present... Kings climb the Ziggurat And steal the myth of creation And the Sumerian language; Soldiers throw their helmets at the unseen That’s the continuous present... Lightning leads the floods to processions of the weary Running darkness tracks the bitter body and the memory. I will describe you, Oh war! O my war! With black writing or purple writing; I will dig your mine fields With Cuneiform characters Or with the bones of your victims; Here are my clay tablets They are all chipped; Not your gods Not your kings Not your clerics And not your floods Were able to wipe off the blood of them It’s a ruined language But it breaths through its wound. We die, and the war doesn’t stop; Our sons walk to it And it stands on their shadows; Our sons die Yet the war doesn’t stop; Their sons walk to it And it doesn’t stop Their sons walk to it And it doesn’t stop And their sons walk to it And it doesn’t stop. *** Translated by : Em. Prof. Inaam Al-Hashimi USA *Salah Hassan is an Iraqi poet http://www.alnoor.se/article.asp?id=212005