1. Teach your tongue to listen, for here is Iraq..
Cursed be every tongue that has not been an ear!

2. The clay of this world would not have been kneaded
The blood of imagination that was injected into my mind

3. With what settled of its tragedies, and what ripened
You find the peninsula, Egypt, Levant and Yemen

4. Maps wherever their landmarks appeared
The prison, warden, and prisoners resembled one another

5. O Scheherazade, dance, for the situation is one
Whether you dance for us or dance for yourself

6. And dissolve in the Thousand and One Nights a sweetness
With which we sweeten pains and tribulations

7. And tell, for there are ears and tongues..
Cursed be every tongue that has not been an ear!

8. Add to your belonging a root, for here is Iraq
Two rivers embracing genesis and time

9. Add to your belonging a music, rippling with
The water of the Euphrates upon the palm tree's chest

10. O you who appeared anciently while the horizon was naught
So you paved the earth until it became inhabited

11. From the world of the heart came your prophecy
Seeking, so you were entrusted with inspiration

12. And you summoned revelation from anxious horizons
In the mind's unseen so laws would germinate

13. And you inclined toward meanings silently
In their utterance, so you endowed them with eloquent tongues

14. Until, when you arranged the earthly world like a lofty notion
And distributed in its ideas the cities

15. You called on the divine will to flow with what it carried
Of destinies, be it joy or sorrow

16. And since the unseen confided its tribulation in him
He remains with the unseen's secret tested

17. The mills of time blew against him, grinding him
Sensing him with their harsh teeth

18. By God, o father of the two rivers! If a mountain
Faced what you faced, it would have crumbled

19. O captain whose sail never met a storm
Without bracing itself against it, our anchor

20. And successor of Noah in his ship
Where the trust found the most faithful of trustees

21. You still stand erect in the flood's fist
While the wave around you is a ghoul swallowing ships

22. The tide overwhelms you as a cub in his prime
And recedes from you an elder, his might weakened

23. And you are a head the prophets stand by
And carry upon their shoulders tribulations

24. Enough are the messages in the night of struggle if
You awake while the cowards sleep

25. O brow of noble zeal that carried none but al-Husayn
And went seeking al-Hasan

26. You remain the ransom lamb of earth, slaughtered by
The lord of the flock to satisfy an idol with it

27. So you made concessions with eyes that lusted
And made no concessions for those in whom we dwelled

28. Loyalty refuses until the last breath except
To be entrusted to al-Abbas

29. If a people concede their poem
Prepare for them the jujube, camphor and shroud

30. I thirst for your water, o father of the two rivers! In me is a thirst
For revelation that did not cease flowing in your two rivers

31. I am too small-mouthed to add more blood
To Karbala, and bestow rest upon the stranger

32. Grant me a heart steadfast and steadfast
That I may gather your burning pain in it

33. For I have found you a thread in the horizon of death
And swords in the eyes of mortality

34. My words have stood in a line in their expression
Donning rhythm and gaining composure

35. Greetings, o Imam of water, in a time
Whose clouds rain hatreds and distress

36. If I come to you with aided dreams
You are to me a palm tree's heart fused

37. And if I split from my being a scent
Toward your barn, I have from your self my self

38. And wherever man feels his dignity
By place, he has found homeland

39. I love you, o killer whose blade is a string
That plays killing ever so gently

40. I have come with a flock of angels
Entrusted with what I carried of passion

41. I stood at the brink of your tremor, confused
With yearning, a star dangling in my blood and approaching

42. I extend my arm like the oud's neck embracing
The chest of wounds that found no embrace

43. So race with your wound toward resplendent melodies
Pure white, and dress it with gauze and cotton

44. I declared you love, a love we do not deserve
If we do not see it displayed

45. Today a human is born upon my lips
From the anthem composed in Babylon

46. I have come to shake off the Suspended Poem
From commandments - neither a quarter nor a tenth

47. Let me blame the camel driver in my tongue:
How much did he waste in the desert a river of wealth!

48. And do not ask a poet about his tribe
That lives on its inheritance of misery and distress:

49. My grandfather Farazdaq did not stop
My uncle Jarir insulting him with malodorous curses

50. Do not be fooled by gilded scriptures
For they may carry worms and decay

51. I did not see your face in the mirror of its moment..
I saw it in the mirrors of yesterday, imprisoned!

52. Ignite your flint in the past and its conduct
The same if the past frolicked or grew fat

53. I took refuge in you from what the torrent
Of the tribe might bring in its tumultuous seditions

54. I have Solomon's doubts, so pardon me
If I slaughter the discerning hoopoe

55. O noble family of loftiness, we have a womb
From music, we have family, we have.. and we have

56. A will we split from its breasts
Of old, and when we descended we breathed its milk

57. And the soul's shadows remain one
Due to how much we bury one another in each other

58. We came to life and engineered the void with it
A dream net sprinkling creatures with purpose

59. Since the first letter our fingers did not doze
Upon it, and did not covet nap

60. We slapped the sky's face with a laugh
Mocking those who held God in pawn

61. And whenever the pulse of the universe faltered confused
We went balancing it with poetry and it steadied

62. We reproduce this creation, make it
Sweeter, and endow it colors and allure

63. Except jinn made it their dwelling
So my regrets in obsessive worry

64. Whether worry in the world is blessed or cursed
Despite the processions, graves overflowed

65. Due to how much the earth’s interior congested and clotted
Do not read the Abundance surah in a homeland

66. That built metaphor.. built meaning.. built.. and built
Nothing enticed the flesh but its killer’s sword

67. Until the sword bent back disgraced and subjugated
So here death is loftier than its tragedy

68. A meaning, and more radiant than life's countenance
O you for whom we raised hymns of glory

69. So you leaned toward us in kindness and bent
You still delight in the earthly world

70. As much as this world delights in you
You marry one land to another, and how many a land

71. In it places fornicate with places!
How much sacred spirit in your soil

72. That embodied it and became body for the heavens
No rosary was blessed in the hand of faith

73. Until it sang to you praise and grace
We sought your approval and settled in its field..

74. What would approval be if not homeland?!
Upon you we leaned on the shoulders of a memory

75. That affirms time so it does not fail us
Who came before nights, it is not said to him:

76. You were late for those who raced time!
They said: You have evaporated! They said it, not glancing

77. Until you condensed in their horizons, weighted
The earth must live on hope

78. In which no green growth wears finery