Like any other country, Iraq is another country known of its own unending warring wars and head splitting series of politically motivated banditry and massacres. Every country on this beautiful but now wretched earth suffer its own traumas. Iraq is one country that have seen the hand of war burning fathers’ hope and mothers’ wombs to death in broad day light, like in Africa’s Sudan, Congo and Somalia. Iraq’s have been on the run-in their hushed hunt for peace, fervent search for freedom, in their quest for calm settlement. FALEEHA HASSAN is an Iraq poet now living in United States of America. She chronicles war poetry and her emotional but diligently carved versifications re-awaken and evoke the reader to watch her homeland through the mirror of her satire and peep unmarked graves long lost lives and through broken windows of allusion and imagery. Despite her tough experiences of growing in life pounding war-times, watching reality films of death and heart-rending wails of dying humanity. Accomplished HASSAN packages her depressions, suffering, traumas and expectations inside the marrow and bone of poetic verses. Her poems are succulent with ripe meaning and the verses dangle with insidious ,belly pit emotion .She snort metaphor to the walls of her country emblazoned with war graffiti .Beloved reader , I would like you to take your couch to a silent secluded corner , read attentively and listen carefully to this song of memory flowing from the revered pen of this great Word Slinger . TIME OF THE POET REPUBLIC editors are sincerely gratified and profoundly honored to feature an Accomplished Author of twenty-four collections, Prolific Poet, Accomplished Scholar and Writer of greater distinction, FALEEHA HASSAN– (Blurb by Mbizo CHIRASHA)
AFTER FORTY YEARS OF SNOW
Do you remember the watch you gave to me wrapped in a poem?
It is still bound to my soul’s meaning
The more time passes
The more the letters jump into my heart artery
My heart is now pumping flirtation
How many times I have wished
That if my city were not surrounded by graves
Then like a little girl
I would wait for you in a secret garden
Come on!
Take off this thick absence
As thick as a New Jersey coat in the winter time
Melt off the snow that has stacked on the lines of your messages
Mow the grass that has grown on your tongue
Don’t save a sea of tears for me
I am not a mermaid
Make yourself present with words
Woo me
Let me stop demanding my rights
And thrive by the touch of your fingers as they play with my hair
Let me fool myself again
And see you as center of my universe.
WHEN I DRINK TEA IN NEW JERSEY
Like a girl who writes poetry about a boy she has never seen
My day sits with all this disappointment
Counting her fleeting moments
I remember my mother using the smell of onions
To shed her tears in the kitchen
For the absence of my father
Who climbed his life war by war
Whenever he wore his military belt
He wished that war was just an old shoe
He could take it off whenever he liked
And he didn’t need to think of fixing it at the cobbler’s shop
I remember my brother
Who asked in his letters–
When will the war understand that we are not good at dealing with death?
I remember us forty years ago
We were kids, very much kids
With colorful clothes and hearts
It was enough for us to see a balloon
To drown in big laughter
I remember all this now
When I drink my tea
And
I practice my loneliness.
MY DANGEROUS MEMORY
Oh, great
Whenever I dream of birds
The cages fly above my head
And I will need all my lifetime to know which cage belongs to my dream
And then whenever I try to remember my childhood
A bomb falls from my memory and crashes into my reality
……….
“What a lovely sunny morning,”
I told the girl
She was jogging in the forest
She smiled at me and said,
A soldier’s helmet is falling from your memory again.””
Don’t worry. I have so many of them,” I told her”
Everything will be good
I say to myself
And I keep jogging from exile to exile
As my friends keep running from the battlefield of one war to another
And returning as pictures with black frames.
TONIGHT
When I entered my apartment
The stairs were lying like tired men after a hard day’s work
The door a yawning mouth
My TV was listening intently to the sports newscast
And
Like a huge fat woman, the couch was sitting on the floor
Hardly breathing the used air
The curtain tickled the cheek of the window………
Swaying gracefully above
My books slept like babies on the hands of the bookshelves
The dining table was listening to the whispers of her chairs
The lamps were winking at to each other
The fan was busy flailing her arms indifferent
In my apartment
The life looks the same as I left it
Everything is normal
No,
It is more than normal
Strang………
No one missed me?
UNREACHABLE
Oh, my god
This poem!
Whenever I try to make her stand on the reality line
She flutters like Marilyn Monroe’s dress in the imaginations of men
I tell her to keep herself on one meaning
But she defies me
While wearing the interpretation mask
And when she tries to describe the battlefield
She is looking for the effects of kisses
On the collars of the soldiers who are tied down in their trenches
With fear and hopelessness
But if they were to be blown up
And their bodies were every where
Her words would be meaningless
For she hiding behind symbolism
She can’t sense the children’s horror from the bombs
And their attempts to huddle against the remnants of destroyed walls
Her cheeks do not hurt
Like mothers’ cheeks dried of their hot tears poured while waiting for deferred letters from their absent sons
She does not take the risk of thinking
So, she can’t believe any truth
She does not pay attention to my damaged life
Which has been crushed by the harsh machine of days
She is trying to make her words beautiful
So, she sprinkles rose water on an erupting volcano
She is too comfortable with death and even praises him
She is summarizing all this loss, darkness, combustion, destruction, chemical weapons. black banners, coffins, skinning , deprivation, orphanages, curfews, warning, sirens, barbed wire, tanks, thrumming of planes, explosions. Murder. blood shed on the side walk, death, ashes, displacement, emptiness, charred bodies, mass graves, coffins, body traps, yelling, sadness, anger, hunger, thirst, vigilance, slapping …. etc.
She summarizes all of this in one ward
War
While I am, the poet stand in the middle
Watching my body jump from death to death
For nothing
Just to let the poem come
But after all this trouble
She only comes imperfectly
By Faleeha Hassan
FALEEHA HASSAN is a poet, teacher, editor, writer, playwright from Iraq. She is Iraqian diasporian living in the USA. She is the first woman wrote poetry for children in Iraq. She received master’s degree in Arabic literature, and published 24 books. Her poems have been translated into (15) languages, , her book nominated to Pulitzer Prize on 2018, and she is the cultural Ambassador – Iraq, USA .
MEET THE TIME OF THE POET Projects Curator
MBIZO CHIRASHA, Chronicler at Africa Writers Caravan. Founder and Author of the Time of the Poet. UNESCO-RILA Affiliate Artist. Featured Poetry Artist at WorldBeyondWar.Org. Freedom of Speech Fellow to PEN- Zentrum Deutschland,Germany..Literary Arts Activism Diplomatie 2020 Poet in Residence at the Fictional Café (International publishing and literary digital space). 2019 Sotambe Festival Live Literature Hub and Poetry Café Curator. 2019 African Fellow for the International Human Rights Art Festival( ihraf.org) , Essays Contributor to Monk Art and Soul Magazine in United Kingdom .Arts Features Writer at the International Cultural Weekly .His Profiles , Interview and Poems are featured on poesis.si ,in Slovenia. Founder and Chief Editor of WOMAWORDS LITERARY PRESS. Founder and Curator of the Brave Voices Poetry Journal. Co-Editor of Street Voices Poetry triluangal collection( English , African Languages and Germany) intiated by Andreas Weiland in Germany. Poetry Contributor to AtunisPoetry.com in Belgium. African Contributor to DemerPress International Poetry Book Series in Netherlands. African Contributor to the World Poetry Almanac Poetry Series in Mongolia. His latest 2019 collection of experimental poetry A LETTER TO THE PRESIDENT was released by Mwanaka Media and Publishing and is both in print, on Amazon.com and at is featured at African Books Collective. Mbizo Chirasha is the Originator of the Zimbabwe We Want Poetry Campaign. Founder and Creative Director of Girl Child Talent Festival and GirlChildCreativity Project. 2003 Young Literary Arts Delegate to the Goteborg International Book Fair Sweden (SIDA AFRICAN PAVILION) .2009 Poet in Residence of the International Conference of African Culture and Development (ICACD) in Ghana.The Vice President of Poetsof the WORLD,poetasdelmundo.com ,African Region. Global Peace Chain Ambassador. 2009 Fellow to the inaugural UNESCO- Africa Photo- Novel Publishers and Writers Training in Tanzania. 2015 Artist in Residence of the Shunguna Mutitima International Film and Arts Festival in Livingstone, Zambia. A globally certified literary arts influencer, Writer in Residence and Recipient of the EU-Horn of Africa Defend Defenders Protection Fund Grant, Recipient of the Pen Deutschland Exiled Writer Grant. He is an Arts for Peace and Human Rights Catalyst, the Literary Arts Projects Curator, Poet, Writer, publicist is published in more 420 spaces in print and online.
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