I am an Iraqi Man
by Anwer Ghani
Free ebook download: I am an Iraqi Man by Anwer Ghani, legally licensed and available in PDF format.
In the reciprocal language, the souls are mixed, everything becomes anything else, the person becomes the whole and the whole becomes one.
I have always been interested in mutual writing, where the speaker speaks in the form of me and wants you or they or them, and speaks in the form of the absent, but he wants himself. In the reciprocal language, the souls are mixed, everything becomes anything else, the person becomes the whole and the whole becomes one. In this long poem, I adopted the reciprocal language, where the term "I" here usually refers to what we, you, he, you, she, all that or otherwise, and I rarely mean "I".
I am an Iraqi man, means he is, you are, we, it, you, they are, and all this, and Iraq means any land and the whole land.
From the book:
I am an Iraqi man; my life was postponed and my face was stolen by wars. I know nothing about beauty or Detain Falls.
I am an Arab man, and like you, I feel the value of life and the depth of a smile. I have family and children, and like you; I love coffee and eat eggs and cheese for breakfast.
I am a farmer from the south, and all what I carry in my pockets are oranges.
I am from here, the pain land; my father is the groaning and my mother is the weeping.
I am the war’s son; my memory was kneaded by her rugged dance and my heart colored with her gloomy soul. When the tales of the mountains ended at her cold knees, you will find me in her smoky corners with my dreadful shivering.
I am a doctor in my small town’s hospital, and in addition to this, I love the poets. The poets and the physicians are twins and they had drunk the spiritual milk from the same hopeful breast.
I believe in poetry and always spend a huge effort in beseeching a paper to hang my dreams on her chest.
I am a good reader and you know the poet as well as the physician is a good reader.
I am a Babylonian poet; I love the blossoms and the colors of the Kashmiri people’s dresses. I love Simic’s poems very much and I wish to visit the poetry institutes in New York, but I am banned, so I am sad, and I will tell this story to my children.
I am from the Middle East, and this is all my crime.
I am an Iraqi man waking up every morning with a poetic soul and a rhythmic speech and standing with my painting beside that tall tree but I can't forget that mud which we had kneaded with our pain and the sand which we had eaten with our bread.
I am neither a horse nor a rabbit and when the sunset kisses their old wood I realize the sweetness of the fence-less life, but when all these horses with their heroes stand on my back, at that time I will remember our war’s children.
I am an Iraqi man; my voice is vaporous as a shadow and my dreams’s clothes are as short as a laugh.
I am sitting behind the trees to see their glory, dissolving in my master words:" everything has a river soul, even you."
I am an Iraqi man knows nothing but death and see nothing but darkness. My land, and unlike Whitman continent, had immersed in gloomy desert, and stand barely with moonless nights and sunless days.
