Baghdad, Mon Amour

Sam Hamill wrote a long piece about POETS AGAINST THE WAR, for
THE VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW, Spring 2005.

We begin to die the day we are silent about the things that
matter........Martin Luther King, Jr.


I spent ten days in Piacenza at a great literary festival with
sixty or so writers from Europe, Africa, South and Central
America, and Cuba. It was in Piacenza that I was fortunate enough
to meet and read with Salah al Hamdani, an Iraqi poet in exile
who had endured years in Saddam's prisons and who now makes his
home in Paris.


Baghdad, Mon Amour

by Salah al Hamdani
(translated by Molly Deschenes)


You cannot be crucified
On the side of a page
Of a story that is not your own,
Nor to the rhythm of the deaths that brood your plagues
Because there will be no cry to relieve your grief.

You cannot be crucified on the banks of the streams
Your body bleeds,
When the Euphrates washes away the secret of its soul
At the birth of a new defeat.
I know this:
No wound deserves a war.

You cannot be crucified at nightfall,
When you did not close your prayers
On the body of palm trees
Because there is no honorable assassin.

You cannot be crucified for the cinders of calamities,
For the tombs of your gods,
Or for the belief of a dying humanity.

Baghdad mon amour,
Not son, nor father, nor God,
No prophet crowned by the church will save your soul,
Not that of Mecca,
Not that of those who refuse
To share the olive trees in Palestine.

This is my notebook of war,
The years of exiles folded in a suitcase
Too long abandoned to the dreams of the convicted.

This is my share of victims,
My share of moon,
My harvest of nothingness,
My share of dust, words and cries.
This is my misfortune
Like a comma locking a line of ink.

Baghdad my love,
I was crouched in the corner of the page
In the shelter of the arid days,
Far from the torrents of blood
That carry the name of those shot with the silence of man.

Baghdad, mon amour,
Sitting like a Bedouin in a mirage
Lying on my shores, I cherished my own shroud.
Far from the cross, Fatima's palm and the star of David
Far from their books, their wars
Wandering in the sand of the dunes,
From the steppe to the city
I drag my body from season to season,
I trail you along from the couch to the mirror,
from my room to the street
Between my writing and my solitude
In the shelter of their cemeteries,
Their martyrs, their morgues.

Baghdad my love,
You cannot tremble at the threshold of these ruins of days,
A civilization trained to kill
Violated your virginity.

Baghdad,
city forever rebellious against your torturer Saddam,
You cannot groan at the only revelation of this hegemony,
Those who rushed around your body at death's door,
These "liberators" are their accomplices.

Madinat-al Salam,
City of peace,
Love in the soul of writing.
Baghdad my wound,
My father the working man died without knowing joy,
My mother mislaid her youth in the mirror
And the only witness to my first grief on your breast
Is the breath of the sand,
The starry sky and God's gaze on the call to prayer.

I wished so much today that man had never discovered fire
And cursed it to advance so much in its own din.
This soil that gave birth to me, today put to death.
Oh mother! I want to return inside your flesh
To hear the beating of your heart,
To quench my thirst in the murmur of your breath.

Very dangerous man, this poet with a huge, gentle, aching heart.
Would our reporters ask him to "just leave the politics out of
it?" How would Laura Bush "just leave the politics out" of the
good gray Whitman? Langston had one subject: the African-
American experience. How does one "leave the politics out"
of that? I sat on that stage in the crowded little town square
in Piacenza, and as I listened to Salah's elegant, steady
baritone, I wept for my country and for his. I promised him
afterward that I would get at least this poem of his,
given to me in French, translated for an American audience.

Sam Hamill 2005