Dunya Mikhail

1 I wanted to write an epic about suffering, but when I found a tendril of her hair among the ruins of her mud house, I found my epic there. 2 I didn’t sleep last night. As if the night were hiding in the morning coffee. 3 Her life is a game of snakes and ladders sent relentlessly back to square one, but whose life isn’t? She takes a breath and throws the dice again. 4 The city glitters below the airplane window, not because of the bones and skulls scattered under the sun, but the view through the frosted breather hole. 5 She died, and time changed for those she loved most, but her watch kept ticking. 6 A god carried the burdens until the weight persuaded him to transfer them to man — the new suffering god. 7 The map of Iraq looks like a mitten, and so does the map of Michigan — a match I made by chance. 8 If you can’t save people, at least don’t hate them. 9 Her bubbling annoys me — can’t understand a word she says. So what if I toss her from the aquarium? So what if I spill her new world with this nasty immigrant fish! 10 The city’s innumerable lights turning on and off remind us we are born to arrive, as we are born to leave. 11 The handkerchiefs are theirs, but the tears are ours. 12 Women running barefoot. Behind them, stars falling from the sky. 13 So strange, in my dream of us, you were also a dream. 14 He said to me:You are in my eyes. Now when he sleeps, his eyelids cover me. 15 Gilgamesh stopped wishing for immortality, for only in death could he be certain of seeing his friend Enkidu again. 16 Some say love means putting all your eggs in one basket. If they all break, can the basket remain intact? 17 The homeless are not afraid to miss something. What passes through their eyes is how the clouds pass over the rushing cars, the way pigeons miss some of the seeds on the road and move away. Yet only they know what it means to have a home and to return to it. 18 The wind and rain don’t discriminate in buffeting us. We are equal in the eyes of the storm. 19 When I was broken into fragments, you puzzled me back together piece by piece. I no longer fear being broken in any moment. 20 Freezing in the mountains without blankets or food, and all they heard was no news is good news. 21 Their stories didn’t kill me but I would die if I didn’t tell them to you. 22 Before killing them they collected their personal effects. Their cell phones are all ringing in the box. 23 We are not upset when the grass dies. We know it will come back in a season or two. The dead don’t come back but they appear every time in the greenness of the grass. 24 If yearning encircles us, what does it portend? That a circle has no beginning and no end?

1 I close my eyes and I see a dot. It becomes a spot of light. It grows into the size of a person who distances away until it returns to a spot of light, a dot. 2 Like communion bread, your words dissolve in my mouth and never die. 3 I don’t care under which sky — just sing your song till the end. 4 The bone-city I am choked by is also salt also sugar also boiling water in the kettle with no lid. 5 Ask not how many houses were built. Ask how many residents remained in the houses. 6 The flame opens like a giant plant swallowing them one by one with their lost and found sheep. 7 She whose song has no beginning nor end — She whose voice faded into stars and moons — Where is she? Where is she? 8 Dreams come in two types: vertical and horizontal. Tell me the shape of your dream and I will tell you where you come from. 9 Fire and light both sting. We go to sleep when the other half of the globe wakes up. Night and day crammed with dreams. 10 Your look passes through me like lightning. 11 The butterfly that flew a moment ago over the killed ones was the soul searching for home. 12 Our time together has ripened and smashed like berries. 13 Can your camera capture fear in the eyes of mother-sparrow, see the broken eggs in her eyes? 14 A little air means so much for the bird. In the air, a full world extends. The clouds gather and then separate. The leaves wave to each other. For the bird, everything hangs in the air. 15 The pomegranate seeds scattered with our steps were not from heaven. 16 My paper boat that drifted into the river with the world behind it had a special note. It may arrive one day, although late, all truths come late. 17 Dried leaves over there our first yearnings. 18 The shoes by the door will not fit them when they return. 19 She counts the pebbles by her fingers. The other pebbles under water are losses outside her hands. 20 Specks of sand scattered from the fingers our people. 21 The sun reveals a hole in the boat, a glow in the fins of fish still breathing. 22 The day and the night divide our steps on the road as they equally divide the world. 23 I was born. I write poetry. I will die. 24 Her shadow is still here feeding the birds.

1 She pressed her ear against the shell: she wanted to hear everything he never told her. 2 A single inch separates their two bodies facing one another in the picture: a framed smile buried beneath the rubble. 3 Whenever you throw stones into the sea it sends ripples through me. 4 My heart’s quite small: that’s why it fills so quickly. 5 Water needs no wars to mix with water and fill up spaces. 6 The tree doesn’t ask why it’s not moving to some other forest nor any other pointless questions. 7 He watches tv while she holds a novel. On the novel’s cover there’s a man watching tv and a woman holding a novel. 8 On the first morning of the new year all of us will look up at the same sun. 9 She raised his head to her chest. He did not respond: he was dead. 10 The person who gazed at me for so long, and whose gaze I returned for just as long . . . That man who never once embraced me, and whom I never once embraced  . . . The rain wrecked the colors around him on that old canvas. 11 He was not with the husbands who were lost and then found; he did not come with the prisoners of war, nor with the kite that took her, in her dream, to some other place, while she stood before the camera to have her smile glued into the passport. 12 Dates piled high beside the road: your way of  kissing me. 13 Rapunzel’s hair reaching down from the window to the earth is how we wait. 14 The shadows the prisoners left on the wall surrounded the jailer and cast light on his loneliness. 15 Homeland, I am not your mother, so why do you weep in my lap like this every time something hurts you? 16 Never mind this bird: it comes every day and stops at the branch’s edge to sing for an hour or two. That’s all it does: nothing makes it happier. 17 House keys, identity cards, faded pictures among the bones . . . All of these are scattered in a single mass grave. 18 The Arabic language loves long sentences and long wars. It loves never-ending songs and late nights and weeping over ruins. It loves working for a long life and a long death. 19 Far away from home — that’s all that changed in us. 20 Cinderella left her slipper in Iraq along with the smell of cardamom wafting from the teapot, and that huge flower, its mouth gaping like death. 21 Instant messages ignite revolutions. They spark new lives waiting for a country to download, a land that’s little more than a handful of dust when faced with these words: “There are no results that match your search.” 22 The dog’s excitement as she brings the stick to her owner is the moment of opening the letter. 23 We cross borders lightly like clouds. Nothing carries us, but as we move on we carry rain, and an accent, and a memory of another place. 24 How thrilling to appear in his eyes. She can’t understand what he’s saying: she’s too busy chewing his voice. She looks at the mouth she’ll never kiss, at the shoulder she’ll never cry on, at the hand she’ll never hold, and at the ground where their shadows meet.

Everything has gender in Arabic. History is male. Fiction is female. Dream is male. Wish is female. Feminine words are followed by a circle with two dots over. They call it the tied circle, knotted with wishes which come true only when forgotten or replaced by the wishes of others. In the town of tied wishes, people feel great anticipation because a stranger will arrive today in her feminine sign. Someone says he saw her two dots glittering, refuting another’s vision of a cat’s eyes hunting in darkness. So scary, he says,how the moon hides in her red circle

He plays a train. She plays a whistle. They move away. He plays a rope. She plays a tree. They swing. He plays a dream. She plays a feather. They fly. He plays a general. She plays people. They declare war.

When my grandmother died I thought, “She can’t die again.” Everything in her life happened once and forever: her bed on our roof, the battle of good and evil in her tales, her black clothes, her mourning for her daughter who “was killed by headaches,” the rosary beads and her murmur, “Forgive us our sins,” her empty vase from the Ottoman time, her braid, each hair a history — First were the Sumerians, their dreams inscribed in clay tablets. They drew palms, so dates ripen before their sorrows. They drew an eye to chase evil away from their city. They drew circles and prayed for them: a drop of water a sun a moon a wheel spinning faster than Earth. They begged: “Oh gods, don’t die and leave us alone.” Over the Tower of Babel, light is exile, blurred, its codes crumbs of songs leftover for the birds. More naked emperors passed by the Tigris and more ships . . . The river full of crowns helmets books dead fish, and on the Euphrates, corpse-lilies floating. Every minute a new hole in the body of the ship. The clouds descended on us war by war, picked up our years, our hanging gardens, and flew away like storks. We said there isn’t any worse to come. Then the barbarians came to the mother of two springs. They broke my grandmother’s grave: my clay tablet. They smashed the winged bulls whose eyes were sunflowers widely open watching the fragments of our first dreams for a lifetime. My hand on the map as if on an old scar.

1. In the first year of war they played “bride and groom” and counted everything on their fingers: their faces reflected in the river; the waves that swept away their faces before disappearing; and the names of newborns. Then the war grew up and invented a new game for them: the winner is the one who returns from the journey alone, full of stories of the dead as the passing wings flutter over the broken trees; and now the winner must tow the hills of dust so lightly that no one feels it; and now the winner wears a necklace with half a metal heart for a pendant, and the task to follow is to forget the other half. The war grew old and left the old letters, the calendars and newspapers, to turn yellow with the news, with the numbers, and with the names of the players. 2. Five centuries have passed since Scheherazade told her tale. Baghdad fell, and they forced me to the underworld. I watch the shadows as they pass behind the wall: none look like Tammuz. He would cross thousands of miles for the sake of a single cup of tea poured by my own hand. I fear the tea is growing cold: cold tea is worse than death. 3. I would not have found this cracked jar if it weren’t for my loneliness, which sees gold in all that glitters. Inside the jar is the magic plant that Gilgamesh never stopped looking for. I’ll show it to Tammuz when he comes, and we’ll journey, as fast as light, to all the continents of the world, and all who smell it will be cured or freed, or will know its secret. I don’t want Tammuz to come too late to hear my urgent song. 4. When Tammuz comes I’ll also give him all the lists I made to pass the time: lists of food, of books, lost friends, favorite songs, list of cities to see before one dies, and lists of ordinary things with notes to prove that we are still alive. 5. It’s as if I’m hearing music in the boat’s hull, as if I can smell the river, the lily, the fish, as if I’m touching the skies that fall from the words “I love you, ” as if I can see those tiny notes that are read over and over again, as if I’m living the lives of birds who bear nothing but their feathers. 6. The earth circled the sun once more and not a cloud nor wind nor country passed through my eyes. My shadow, imprisoned in Aladdin’s lamp, mirrors the following: a picture of the world with you inside, light passing through a needle’s eye, scrawlings akin to cuneiform, hidden paths to the sun, dried clay, tranquil Ottoman pottery, and a huge pomegranate, its seeds scattered all over Uruk. 7. In Iraq, after a thousand and one nights, someone will talk to someone else. Markets will open for regular customers. Small feet will tickle the giant feet of the Tigris. Gulls will spread their wings and no one will fire at them. Women will walk the streets without looking back in fear. Men will give their real names without putting their lives at risk. Children will go to school and come home again. Chickens in the villages won't peck at human flesh on the grass. Disputes will take place without any explosives. A cloud will pass over cars heading to work as usual. A hand will wave to someone leaving or returning. The sunrise will be the same for those who wake and those never will. And every moment something ordinary will happen under the sun.

A fish meets another fish and lays eggs. As its fins signal to the seaweed its colors come out one after the other. Its bubbles are words meant for no one. The world rises and falls each day through the eyes of a fish.

Yesterday I lost a country. I was in a hurry, and didn't notice when it fell from me like a broken branch from a forgetful tree. Please, if anyone passes by and stumbles across it, perhaps in a suitcase open to the sky, or engraved on a rock like a gaping wound, or wrapped in the blankets of emigrants, or canceled like a losing lottery ticket, or helplessly forgotten in Purgatory, or rushing forward without a goal like the questions of children, or rising with the smoke of war, or rolling in a helmet on the sand, or stolen in Ali Baba's jar, or disguised in the uniform of a policeman who stirred up the prisoners and fled, or squatting in the mind of a woman who tries to smile, or scattered like the dreams of new immigrants in America. If anyone stumbles across it, return it to me, please. Please return it, sir. Please return it, madam. It is my country. . . I was in a hurry when I lost it yesterday.

—I want to draw the sky. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And why do you spread the colors this way? —Because the sky has no edges. . . . —I want to draw the earth. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And who is this? —She is my friend. —And where is the earth? —In her handbag. . . . —I want to draw the moon. —Draw it, my darling. —I can't. —Why? —The waves shatter it continuously. . . . —I want to draw paradise. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —But I don't see any colors. —It is colorless. . . . —I want to draw the war. —Draw it, my darling. —I have. —And what is this circle? —Guess. —A drop of blood? —No. —A bullet? —No. —Then, what? —The button that turns off the lights.