Asian Geographic Issue 04/2017 (126) | Page 3

timeless
The Dragon
By Abdul Wahab al-Bayati (1926–1999)
A dictator, hiding behind a nihilist’s mask,
has killed and killed and killed,
pillaged and wasted,
but is afraid, he claims,
to kill a sparrow.
His smiling picture is everywhere:
in the coffeehouse, in the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.
Satan used to be an original,
now he is just the dictator’s shadow.
[…]
The dictator hides his disgraced face in the mud.
Now he is having a taste of his own medicine,
and the pillars of deception have collapsed,
his picture is now underfoot,
trampled by history’s worn shoes.
The deposed dictator is executed in exile,
another monster is crowned in the hapless
homeland.
The hourglass restarts,
counting the breaths of the new dictator,
lurking everywhere,
in the coffeehouse, the brothel,
in the nightclub, and the marketplace.
ABDUL WAHAB AL-BAYATI (December 19,
1926 – August 3, 1999) was an Iraqi modernist
poet who was known for his use of free verse,
as opposed to classical Arabic forms. His
views against the Iraqi government forced
him to spend most of his life in exile, though
his works – more than 20 volumes of poetry –
were never banned in his home country.
Source: Iraqi Poetry Today (ISBN 095338246X)
(c) 2003, edited by Saadi Simawe
Translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab, Najat Rahman
and Carolina Hotchandani
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