KAREEM ABDULLAH

 

 

The Soldiers Of God

 

Heavily armed with their frustration, Your soldiers drag the metropolis misery before your authority that ends up in the blindest tyranny, violate their humanity and you do not know anything about the banks of supplication lounged on by her distant voice that comes to the ears of the sea, whenever the trees of alienation smile, the extensive face of night falls, lying there, ahead the soldiers as deconstructing my lavishing history on the tongues of the ominous war…. They led the leftover of dream crucified in your shining evening, searing it in front of the mockery of stations, elegized by the childbirth of a morning that sleeps on the brink of a glow of the waiting of my return shackled with rifles as tearing the whoop of the resurrection, tattooed on the wings of the colourful butterflies behind the glass of the bombed cars .

 

TRANSLATED BY JOHN HENRY SMITH

 

In Your Rivers

 

chopping are the clouds

O tempting Eve, the clothed

With the thirst of Orchards

Abandoned

In the bends of the night sheets

O Averse you are

In the terrain of

The chest cage,

Your figs are not yet

Ripen on the branches of rebellion.

Hits fire

In the table of desire

The spark of the breasts.

And you melt temptation

From Adam's rib

O dancer

On the lust of infatuation melodies

In my books, baptized with rain

Of the spells of appetite ..

Pour your perfume stronger

In the tumbler of

Imagination…

The sparrows, imprisoned in my dreams,

Are looking for your cooing

For the pulsing radiance in the prayers of the lips

And the spilled inhale awakens

The oblations in the dark

A pain moans

For your forest

That widely opens the trunks of her trees…fertilizes

Roots decayed by the waiting mites

And drinks hunger from

The arroyos loved

By oblivion

 

TRANSLATED BY JOHN HENRY SMITH

 

KAREEM ABDULLAH

 

KAREEM ABDULLAH is an Iraqi poet, novelist, and literary critic. He was born in Baghdad in 1962. Kareem Abdullah is the author of the book "Baghdad in Her New Dress" (2015, Book House) as well as several other poetry collections, novels, and plays. His name has appeared in many important Arabic literary magazines, and he won the Tajdeed Prose Poetry Prize in 2016. Kareem has eight poetry collections in Arabic, and his poems have been translated into several languages.