Al-Taq Suburb, A Poem by Muwaffaq Muhammad

Al-Taq Suburb
By: Muwaffaq Muhammad
Translated by Dr Hussain Alwan Hussain (2008)
I have never been a poet at any day … I was just a minstrel for a poetess called Hilla
Before the death of my mother,
A tear fell-off her womb:
Bringing into being this tree.
She told her: "Be a mother."
And the doves fluttered in her breasts,
And she hued her boughs,
And packed her fruits to our hearts content with the honey of peace.
She said to her, "Be clouds."
And a bud flew off her in a fluttering wing
Tying to the air
Clouds with heavy water.
She said to her, "Be a house."
And her boughs entwined,
Dressed in the shroud of the sky.
Mother took a seed from the cluster of stars
That hang from our ceiling,
And a thread from the moon-light hidden in her eyes;
Then she kissed us with piety and shivering;
And died.
The name of the mother: Badriyya Abdulla
Profession: a goddess of love and peace.
She shines before the sun upon Shatt-il-Hilla
Awakening its waves with prayers,
To fill her urn from the milk of the Euphrates,
And encircle seven times around my father s grave –
Who is sleeping under a bitter-sweet-date-palm that he planted
In the navel of the Euphrates –
To sweeten it from his bitter-patience
And baptize us one after another.
"Oh, son;
I gave birth to you in the ice-blue February, at dawn;
And as I moved off you, to milk the cow,
Your daddy s mother cried:
Impure woman! Go, and cleanse yourself!
So I walked confounded to Shatt-il-Hilla,
And the icy torrent drifted me away;
But the date-palm tree extended her umbilical cord,
And rescued me from the River s freezing torrent."
We were ten orphans, who slept where the River slept,
We studied till the morning by my father s grave,
And when my younger brother – who has never seen his father –
Lisped with his first Reading text-book words: "noory, nar",
Mother smiled,
And a flower blossomed in his tombstone,
And I saw my father, in his thick eye-glasses,
As he engraved with his numberless wedges the name of my mother
On his bronze seal.
That was his profession;
He used to stamp our hearts with it,
Making them soar in the light.
And from a waist in the name of my mother,
The moon dances in the sky.
At night, dad leans to salute his Teacher,
And the River responds with a better salute,
And signals to him with a wave whose wing is broken,
And father accepts the invitation…
He puts off his slippers and enters the River prostrating,
Calling the waves by their names,
And we flutter around him,
And the birds drink from his palms.
He endows each wave with a beak to feed the chicks
With the clouds dreaming in his date-palm tree.
And we see a flock of clouds polishing its wings in the space;
And kisses of light springing in a date palm-tree hanging from the sky.
*****
We were ten orphans, who slept where the River slept.
At midnight,
In Al-Taq suburb,
Where the River engraves its coast,
My mother takes her place at the shore;
And the River comes to her lap.
And in a voice purer than all the waters of the earth
She lulls in his ears:
Dililloul, oh River – my son – dililloul;
And the River sleeps in the wine of her hoarse voice,
And suckles us from his drowsiness to sleep.
In the morning, she swings her livelihood,
And it falls down upon her a pain in the embryo
That bruises some clear sky in her face,
And two brown eyes,
And a moon bright in her forehead,
And stars glittering in her index of the Quran,
As she recites for us the Sura of Yasseen –
From which the pearls and chorals emerge.
And we fly as sparrows between the star and the Sura,
And we chirp in the Women s Public Bathhouse.
The fish used to come from the river to our house,
Dancing in the nets of my father,
And in his boat that circles us around at night,
To gather what the moon sprinkles down;
To water the infants from the daughter-palm trees.
And I am enraptured by the beating of his oar,
And by the voice of Sa dee:
"My beloved, when you say to your mother: O mother!
My heart connects with her heart";
And the waves connect in an eternal mourn
That springs from those urns in which the Iraqis
Have concealed their pains since the Rise of Civilization.
There is nothing but pain and sighs,
And a soul residing in Baghdad, contradicting his heart at Basra,
And Madloula makes the candles float upon Shatt-il-Hilla;
Candles that gather the dew of the waves
To inscribe upon the water-flower:
"Lo my moon,
In your voice is the pollen of the date-palm trees.
Has the time not come for the butterflies that flutter in my body,
To wet their wings with its dust;
And burn in its rage,
To re-bring to the ear its seeds
Before they go to the market-place?
They advice us not to again anger the River.
And what do you know about the River s anger?
So, we kiss His waves,
And plead Him to forgive our sins of the last night
When we conquered him screaming:
"Oh whale, Oh swallower,
Release our moon tonight."
For the River and duck are angry with us,
And we awakened the gulls from their sleep,
Making them stumble in their flight.
A wave full of stars in its locks said to me:
"Communicate to him my greetings."
And my heart turns aside
And sees her bouncing up the stream.
And when she comes back from the market-place
She gently descends the cloud from her head;
Shakes off her scarf, and engulfs us with a watery Hallelujah.
And the bread-oven boils up from a prayer firing in her chest.
How narrow is the world!
And how wide are our lanes!
For we see the capital cities of the world
No more than the heads of pins upon a map.
So, who has lured Churchill to get entangled with the Taq s people?
And we dance and dance
Till the River catches his moustache
And swears by a wave – that takes a nap on his left arm –
Spreading the lower cloth of His gown:
"I ll make babyhood flow between the lanes and the river;
Between the river and the far shore;
Between the shore and the sun
That bathes naked in the date-palm trees,
Hanging their necklaces and earrings in their clusters;
Between the necklaces and the moons that ascend its heads
In the breasts of girls."
And we shiver shy
As we kindle the ears of seeds with the tears of our mother;
And implant it in the waist of the River
For the spinster streams to drink.
Oh, what a pipe of lament arise
When we tie a canal of a cracking mud
To another whose clay the winds sweep!
And as we blow,
The villages slip from their tombs –
Nobody is awaiting them –
And so they vanish into hell as usual,
Waiting for some new images.
When the swallow bird returns to the Indus Valley
He swaggers among his mates, bragging that
He owns a nest in Al-Taq suburb:
In the room where Taha Baqir deciphered Cuneiform writing;
And where Al-Baseer the blind saw the light and wrote:
"Lo my country, am I not one of your sons?"
And where the Master Al-Tahir wrote "My Teachers";
And where Abdul-Jabbar Abbas sang:
"Come and remove these pains away from me!"
In unison with a bunch mad in love with Hilla,
And with its wine aged in its Hanging Gardens.
They nobly unload grief from their backs;
Open the book of the river;
And Hilla shines in their eyes
As they carry water to our nests.
Migrating birds change their compasses
As the river gets to Al-Taq suburb,
Coming from Babylon
Heavy with artifacts,
Walking with confident waves,
Raising the banner of fertility.
The River shouts to his waves: "Flow to the right!"
So, water engulfs our homes, and labour starts;
And the watery newborns proceed in swift successions;
And the moon hangs their names in his stars;
And thaws himself in the dimples of the mothers
For the suckling babies to drink his light to the full;
That is why all the people of Hilla
Are born under the Lunar-Milk zodiac sign!
Once I had an uncle,
His name was Shatt-il-Hilla:
He was a poet
Who ascended the ladder of the waves up to the highest tree;
Invited the Tigris to fertility.
He chanted what the sun wrote on the waves,
To the local sons.
So, when will I be able to write like Him?
Once He hid in his dancing wave a kiss;
He said, "Write it down."
And it was a baby in the muse of poetry,
She grew up in water;
One evening, she came to me,
A lady sprinkling with glitter and fragrance,
And we hugged each other for long,
And we filled the land with beautiful, wet magic;
Then we slumbered on the bed of water for long,
And we cleansed our bodies from love which has become a river.
Where are you now, O Mother!
Where are you now, O Uncle!
The wars have dressed You in its uniform;
And the bridges have extended their Military Stars upon You
Grinding your waves,
Rendering them too feeble to carry even a boat
That has down-flagged its whiteness
In fear of snipers.

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