I am thirsty water:
My fountainhead swells
in night’s salty mouth.
It follows the footsteps
of the drowned waves.
I am thirsty water:
a river of tired wishes roaming
toward the ocean.
I flow under the bridge named
for the nine-year-old martyr, under tomorrow,
And cleanse my bloody shore.
I am thirsty water:
Until I descend,
Until I wash my strange eyes and mouth
In the farthest paths,
My thirst will be sipped at, though I, too, am thirsty.
Until I get longer,
Until I open my arms to my future,
The expanse of my fear . . . deepens in the eyes
of the old swimmers.
The babbling of my throat grows stronger, louder
In the ears of hunched sailors.
I am thirsty water.
I am a stream: on my shore, grief deepens its blue,
Pain grows, blossoms,
Branches crown themselves with flame.
Blood is a nightingale that sings.
I am thirsty water.
I eat sorrow and my salted wounds guzzle me down.
The dry, split skin
Of my body, the season of my years, all guzzle me down.
I am tears: my eyes drink me.
I am weeping: my laughter drinks me.
I am a silent lake. The creek’s screams drink me.
My June funerals drink
My March feasts.
I am thirsty water.
I am. My thirst drinks me.
My anxiety inhales my certainty.
My breath inhales my lungs.
My injuries cure my healthy places.
My prisoners nauseate light.
My sins pray.
My nights fast.
I am thirsty water.
I am hungry bread. The poor fill me up.
I am a sun imprisoned:
Prisoners free me.
I am a renter in a deeded house:
For generations in my own city
I have been unseen, unknown.
Among my own clan and people, that’s my place.
My eye blooms in winter’s garden.
I took my first steps in pain’s forest.
I am a lumberjack in the lynch tree
With its hanging rope.
In my death, it transcends.
I am a mountaineer: I scale
The mountain of my pain.
My thirst drinks me.
My thirst breaks with flame.
That’s why I came.
I came on the horse of poetry’s black winds.
I came, I came.
I am a fireplace grown cold.
I came for the poem’s coals.
My words are seeds come to cultivate thought.
I am branches and twigs coming to their roots, their taproot.
I am a body: I came to my head.
I am a mirror: I came to look
At my own shabby and stray shape.
I am a letter. I came by sorrow’s post,
Addressed to a martyr’s grave
Still disturbed by his gravedigger,
Addressed to a martyr’s grave
That has become the martyr’s trench.
His weapon
Returns to the soldier’s hand, the soldier’s harvest.
I came to an address of a martyr shrouded
In a wetland, in the new year’s tulips.
I am a letter written by blood.
The bullet’s hand carried me.
Lightning enveloped me.
I came with clouds of red rain.
I am a letter in the prison of the postman’s pocket.
I am still a prisoner.
I didn’t reach my lover. I didn’t.
For now, only
My envelope reads me.
For now, my eyes are in my hands.
I am a painting. I will be free
Of my frame.
My colors won’t shelter me.
I will break my plated glass.
I will cleanse this face.
From the new,
With the new generation,
I will grasp my colors.
I am a street tired of my own curb.
I am a dagger tired of my own sheath.
I am an epic tired of my own tongue and syntax.
I am thirsty water.
I came to reclaim my drowned waves.
I am a lantern. I came to reclaim my own flame.
I came with a butterfly’s
Tears, a geyser,
Fair eyes, sunshine.
With the wounded white voice
Of Picasso’s dove, I came.
With scorched and smoldering news,
With Sablagh’s charred liver, I started down the road.
On the plane of Barzani’s revolt, I came.
I will land on a bloody runway in Vietnam.
In the house of Mahmood Darwish’s
Migrating poems, I will be a guest.
I will propose to Gikor.
I will take hands with Byron.
I will dance in Lorca’s bloody revels.
I flow under the bone-bridge named
for the nine-year-old martyr, under tomorrow,
And cleanse my bloody shore.
I am thirsty water.
I came rushing into Baba Gurgur.
My thirst breaks with flame.
That’s why I came.
Come, fire,
Come, melt the glaciers in our throats
The icy straits of our fears.
Burn the mask
From our upturned faces.
Read our darkness.
Turn on the light within our mothers’
Darkened breasts.
Wake the sleeping coals under the ash
Of our history.
Come, fire,
Give us bitter love.
Give us honeycomb in the leaves
Of oleanders and willows.
Give us a bouquet in a vase of thorns.
Give us laughter in a city of hate.
Come, fire,
Come, poets of flame,
Come,
Watch over the eyes of fire’s spark, the new
Year’s poetry.
Watch over the words
As yet unborn, in the womb
Of tomorrow’s thoughts.
Come,
Poets of flame, come,
Lead the dance, blazing in celebration,
Beside the groom in hell.
Come into
The moonlight that escaped through the windows
Of the clouds’ palace
And covered the burial mound, the mattress,
Of snow’s bride in yellow moonbeams.
Write poems
In the flames of the villages’ cradles,
Come before the sight of the sun
Into the quiet anger of prison slaves.
Speak in poems.
Come before
The microphone. Executed soldiers of the Viet Cong,
Read your poems.
While hungry lovers meet
Under the tired, sunlit lean-to,
Come, chirp.
Be lightning. Roar.
Torrents of revolution: rain.
I am thirsty water.
The floods that drowned a city named me.
I am the story written by spring rain.
Earth’s refugees
Recount me to each other.
I am thirsty water.
I am hope that places danger before my own body.
My insomnia became my leader.
Wherever martyrs drink me,
Wherever there is Choarchra and
Qamishli and Wan,
Wherever, like here,
Fire cures wounds,
And wounds meet dry
Grins,
Wherever
Victims must seek their knives,
And fields search for sickles,
And necks send word, asking
For the noose and scaffold,
Wherever the pen becomes a minaret
And a Peshmerga calls us to prayer,
Wherever the sun’s shield
Cut down the raised hand of Guevara’s truth,
Wherever death dies,
I am thirsty water.
I am the fountain where history’s blood runs.
The moment I existed, my thirst was guzzled down,
But I am also thirsty.
