Whorehouse
By Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
Baghdad? It’s a giant whorehouse.
The singing girl’s glances
Like a clock ticking on the wall
In a train station departures hall.
O corpse flung on the ground,
Its worms are a wave of flame and silk.
Baghdad’s a nightmare, a rotten ruin
Swallowed up by someone sleeping.
Hours are days there, days are years, and a year is toil.
A year is a wound boiling in the conscience.
Oryx eyes between Rusafah and the Bridge
Are bullet holes dotting the surface of the moon,
Which pours cascades of ashes
From eye sockets onto Baghdad.
The houses are all one;
Paths pressed together like threads—
A giant grasps them,
Stretching them, paralyzing them,
Turning them into a path to high noon.
All the pretty girls’ faces are the face of Nahidah,
My beloved, whose saliva is honey,
My little one, whose hips are a mountain
And whose chest quenches thirst.
As for us in Baghdad, we’re clay
That the potter kneads into a statue.
A world like a madman's dream,
We are colors in its quaking depths, body parts and limbs.
Yesterday was the holiday, the first day of spring.
They brought provisions to the hills:
Wine, dance, singing,
Love, and laughter.
Then it ended, except for the birds
That picked up the seeds, and except for the blood
That waters the field, a colorful bird
And children left circumambulating Ur.
“The holiday? Who said our holiday is done?
Let’s fill the world with song
for the earth is still spinning in holiday.”
Yesterday was the holiday, the first day of spring.
And today what shall we do?
Cultivate or kill?
So this is Baghdad?
Or has Gomorrah returned, so the return was
Death? But in the clinking of chains
I sense… what? The sound of a noria?
Or the shout of sap in roots?
[Translated from the Arabic by Levi Thompson. From Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Unshudat al-Matar (Rainsong) (1962). You can read the original Arabic here.]