[Today, March 31 is the anniversary of the founding of the Iraqi Communist Party in 1934. This poem, "Genesis 34," by Saadi Youssef, was written to commemorate the event.]
Saadi Youssef
Genesis 34
Before we came to the bases
you were a base before God and classes
You were breaking rocks between Nasiriyya and the north
Saying to flowers: The petals are hidden
To papyrus: We hid the rifles in you
To paper: You are the newspaper
To those who are yielding: Come to me. . .
To chaos: Peace be upon those organizing encomia for chaos
shuttling between Nasiriyya and the north
To your face: Darkness has taken hold
To your folk: There is only night after the night
To history: We are dawn. . .
We never took branded horses
We unleashed the horses of jinn
Striking fire
We set out before coming to the bases
Toward a base before God and classes
That was, like us, in Nasiriyya.
Like us in the image of the ancestors
The checkered kaffiyya
Deep black blood in the lines of the tattoo
Back in the days when women were veiled
In funerals and on slow trains
Mosques disappearing in palm trees
The days when churches were still white, mass in Greek
The days when the referent, you:
A base before God and classes
That marched, like us, feet lacerated
Carrying, like us, what ancestors carry
A tattoo on the chin and hands
The pamphlet was blue
The bullet in the eyes of horses
Carrying, like us, what ancestors carry
Between Nasiriyya and the north.
We will repeat this deaf cycle
This amputated flower
We are murdered in cells
Then in positions
Then in our bases. . .
We repeat the deaf cycle and the flower
We repeat the of sensibility of loneliness
And we inhabit singularity
We inhabit the greenness of the tattoo:
In cells not nominated by cells
In positions not defined by positions
In bases that celebrate the blood of treacherous time
We draw far away in our singularity
In the particulars of identity and speech
In the touch of tattooed hands
In the rhythm of the bullet and the question:
Do things rise?
Let things rise in us as things
Rise
A red flag in genesis:
Between Nasiriyya and the north.
[Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon]