BAGHDAD
NIGHTS
We gave them all our dreams – the magic carpet, the
Arabian Nights. They used them for
Disney films and brought us their tanks and their snipers.
-- Aziz
Hassan, Iraqi poet (February 2016)
Night shimmers along
the Street of Books
over
flat rooftops that promise relief
from
crushing heat, disrupted
intermittently
by bursts
of
small-arms fire.
Aladdin’s
dream – that magic swirl of hope
where
chance aligns and fortunes fall from trees,
once
graspable in blue-tiled mosques
and
arching passageways – is now consigned to
splintered
palms, dry rubble piles.
His
name was Allah-Din; but magic
comes
obscured these days -- small expectations
mixed
with dust. What rises is uncertainty.
Each
alley has gone blind. The nomad moon
hangs
motionless, resigned.
First published in What Rough Beast, Aug. 24, 2019