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Best Poems Written by Ali Habash

Below are the all-time best Ali Habash poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Ali Habash Poem

A Country

We multiply by a bomb
Then we bear another.

We drag our children into passport documents.

We multiply far from the bedroom
And spit on our wedding day -
never paying attention to the tears.

On the TV screen
Baghdad storms us with bridges
Carnage of the Al Hadidi* fell in the Tigris -
It disappeared, taking refuge in the gulf

And I became a refugee on buses and newspapers.
I shake

At the first border check point
And I shake

When I hear the news
And I shake

Is there a lorry big enough for me,
For a passer by,
Who exchanged the capital of Al Rashid with a sea?

We’re farther from the wheels of the Mongols,
The black tea
And the darkness of Baghdad.

But the newsreader
Was still shooting at us with his news
While smiling. 


* *  * * *  

The strangers
Ask me about the war.
No one asked me about the shrapnel that blasted the window,
The wardrobe where my dreams had heaped
Amongst metallic coins.


* *  * * *

Baghdad
Is climbing another graveyard,
And I am like a cigarette between two fingers,
Standing far from her walls

Vomiting my dreams on a pavement in Damascus - 
The smell old friends.

Friends who’re working in deception with joy
And the papers urinated on others.

Is homeland a terrace on a tanker
that treads on my dreams everyday
On Al Rashid street?

Or is homeland a dynamite freight
That brings joy to the children?



Jebla / Al Latheqiya  2007




* Al Hadidi: is the bridge of Sarrafiya in Baghdad. It was made of metal and was bombed in 2007.

Details | Ali Habash Poem

Red Lips

I don’t know her.
But after the third glass
She came close to my life
And bumped into the table.

Her fingers were cold -
Alcohol seized the place.
We were drunk
Between two bottles and a lighter.

Her red lips
Stained my new shirt
And the night mingled with chaos
And Tears.

Details | Ali Habash Poem

Fingers

Fingers

They used to translate the war 
for a newspaper;
My fingers
Filled with the dead.
They are tasteless in bed.


The fingers that cross 
Over the breasts at night
Are the same fingers that pull 
A trigger, 
Write reports 
And open prison gates.


Fingers that left their prints  
On a bus near the Zawra Gardens 
And on a rusted gun
At the Rashid Barracks
Have filled with snow;
With letters that cannot write from the left.

Details | Ali Habash Poem

Fingers

Fingers

They used to translate the war 
for a newspaper;
My fingers
Filled with the dead.
They are tasteless in bed.


The fingers that cross 
Over the breasts at night
Are the same fingers that pull 
A trigger, 
Write reports 
And open prison gates.


Fingers that left their prints  
On a bus near the Zawra Gardens 
And on a rusted gun
At the Rashid Barracks
Have filled with snow;
With letters that cannot write from the left.

Details | Ali Habash Poem

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.