RECOLLECTIONS ON THE MORNING AFTER, OUR HOME AND IRAQ INCLUDED

Recollections On The Morning After, Our Home And Iraq included

Homely thoughts, evaporated ideas
about you being a queen in noisy workshops
where our most adorable selves grow.
You in the neighbourhood of
the hunting lodge and of the other home of thickness,
of dense comfortable colors, deign to talk.
Home, mine, ours; I write its plans
with my head bowed down by archaic grief.
Just in: you and me. Building solutions.
While in the low-intensity war in Tikrit,
after a car bomb explosion,
a not professionally looking fireman,
with a hose of small diameter,
moves dirt, black rubble of a crushed breakfast project,
with a weak jet of water.
A slice of people, I have always appreciated,
is carved out at the speed of lightning.
In the rolling rubble, deformed retinas
conserve this black and white twilight, forced on us;
here, the young past is rolling with metal, wood, pebble.
“Be helpful, son, be helpful!”, do not raise your head
unless you finish your woolen rag in warm saturated colors.
The home is ours, of the tribes;
It is only a vision, a mind´s game;
If it were of matter, I would fear its heavy bearing on earth;
Vision on nocturnal screens, at Kirkuk´s summer cinemas
bursting out of our dream´s substance,
boldly announced and related the day after,
born (I hate this word), as our souls housing in our bodies
come closer and closer to each other in flight;
They touch and get thirsty.
And as always, when I talk of you, of our home, Iraq, Kirkuk, Baghdad, Qalat Salih, Al-Imara, of bombs in Iraq,
of minds planning body slaughtering,
of flesh pieces left behind, show on the street;
always when the improbable happens:
My Mesopotamian deities arrive at the spot,
they are here now, on this dim morning,
cursing and arranging the burials;
always when I underline: death is silly, life is worthwhile;
always when I, through silent loudspeakers, paint your virtual image
(though I prefer you, real, at my reach, dusted with gold);
in such hours, I miss the deadline to add:
My home, is ours, home of the tribes, has no walls;
it is an open space, where we all eat, drink, chat and are very noisy;
half unwillingly we perform prayers, on a rotating stage,
just voices, deep-pitched, unrecognizable;
and love is then the great call:
“We shall return.
We shall return all the archaic goods of equilibrium to ourselves.”
O, I was saying:
In our home no child is left unattended to,
and if you two are to kiss each other, we will have your pixels registered, a flowing image, altering by the hour, conserved and reproduced in endless shades and batches, drawn on cardboards.
To it we will add a hand and an eye that would
monumentally reject the expanding fire waves and flames.
Here, the day after, we entertain not the ease of us,
of us being powerful lovers of light and life protectors;
but rather the secrecy of the beauty of a language,
thought to have been lost and now visibly displayed
in uncommon places: boring cars, café tables, and oh, on the road, on endless paths in your mountains and in arid land expansions, framed by Iraqi date palm trees, in the neighbourhood of your little face of fine features – painful and bitter sweet.

Anwar Al-Ghassani
San José, Tuesday, January 11, 2005