The poets eat kahi and drink cardamom tea
in Baghdad, and it could be 1948
or 2004, and it could be British bombers
overhead, or the 173rd Airborne
parachuting down from a metal-blue sky,
but these poets will soon be dead,
and bridges will be blown all over Iraq,
verses I cannot even translate
will be lost forever, lost the way bodies
carry their bullets to the grave,
their wounds closed only by the earth
thrown over, shovel by shovel,
the burial of the 1920 Revolution Brigade
to be repeated again in ‘48
with the Wathbah uprising, and again
it must seem, with the fi ghters
in Tikrit, in Samarra, in Basra and Fallouja,
Jisr Al-Shuhada they cry,
“to die, to die for The Martyr’s Brigade”;
for life is given purpose in struggle,
at least for the young, and the passionate,
for those who discover in fire
an echo of the searing heat of their own veins,
and if I could, I’d be there
on the bridge with Al-Jawahiri in 1948,
with government bullets in the air,
my friend’s brother dying in his arms even now,
and I would hold back the blood
with my own hands, if only to be there
and to ask them both before dying,
Is it worth it? And can there be no other way?