[Illustration: Ronak Aziz, Iraqi artist.]

Tragedies should never be monopolized by reporters and analysts, nor should academics have the last expert-teased word. Baghdad, fabled city of Arabian Nights tales along a river that once flowed from Paradise, is once again hell on earth. To make sense of this senseless waste, we need to turn to the poets. One of the pioneers of modern Arabic poetry in free verse as well as freed spirit was Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, who was born in Iraq in 1926 and died in Damascus, Syria in 1999. He saw the violence that imperially and post-empirely devastated his native land and he wrote profoundly about love, death and exile. A collection of his poetry, in Arabic and English translation by Bassam K, Frangieh, appeared in 1990 (Love, Death and Exile: Poems Translated from the Arabic, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, re-issued in 2004). More than politicians and journalists, native poets sense pain and foster hope long before anyone else notices. Al-Bayati is no exception.

“The Arab leaders are the enemies of their peoples,” the poet told the translator in the mid 1990s. Their last meeting is a telling memorial.
“In 1997 I met Bayati at his favorite restaurant, Al-Yasimeen, in Amman. We had arak, mezza, and dinner, and we talked until midnight. As we left the restaurant, I looked at him and saw an unusual look in his eyes. The poet held me to his chest, held both of my hands, and sadly murmured, ‘Ashes spread inside me. I feel that this is the last time I will see you.’ I cried, ‘Do not say that,’ but he said, ‘I am not afraid of death. I am alive inasmuch as I die.’ When I dropped him off at his home, I turned back hoping to catch one last glimpse. He was still standing there. He was still waving his hand. His face was filled with tears. That was the last time I saw the poet.” (Frangieh 1999, p. xi).

But let the poet speak for timeless Baghdad …

The City (Al-Madina)

I

When the city undressed herself
I saw in her sad eyes:
The shabbiness of the leaders, thieves, and pawns.
I saw in her eyes:
The gallows, the prisons, and the incinerators,
The sadness, the confusion, and the smoke.
I saw in her eyes:
All men
Glued like postage stamps
On everything.
I saw:
The blood and the crime
And the match boxes and the meat tins.
I saw in her eyes:
The orphan childhood
Wandering, searching in the garbage dumps
For a bone
For a moon dying
Upon the corpses of houses.
I saw: the man of tomorrow
Displayed in the storefronts,
On the coins and in the chimneys,
Clothed in sorrow and blackness
The policemen, the sodomites, and the pimps
Spitting in his eyes
As he lay shackled.
I saw in her sad eyes:
The garden of ashes
Drowned in shadow and stillness.

II

When the evening covered her nudity
And the silence enveloped her blind houses,
She sighed
And smiled despite the pallor of her sickness.
Her black eyes shone with goodness and purity.

Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, 1969.
Translated by Bassam K. Frangieh