Adam the Neglected

Soheil Najm To: Barry Sanders

His color in outdoor is dust and browns slightly in water, whenever earth get older he watered it from his moaning, whenever fields go to sleep he wakens them. The ibex took virility from him and fish took fitness. He brothered the trees until they intertwined and rebuilt the throats of birds.

Adam O Adam! catch up the deadline so as stars may not sleep. Adam, bestow the night wines and turn off the morning, Adam shovel the rivulets, and set the wide chairs for us .

Since he exaggerated in reclining on silence they led him to the habit of erasing. He said I am blank and here is my fate in my hand. Yet he remained outside the game, an ignorant stone!

Adam, you who covered with rain, why did they launch you against yourself? Why did death become your delight? Why did you sing from a flute of blood? This is your coffin on the bird's wing

and this is your violet flower so release your tongue and presage to pass to the forest where the winners are sitting lazy of pleasure and where fire and ice in one cup. Baghdad / 2010 Translated by the poet

Black Paradise
Soheil Najm

Look these are wounded clouds and this is bloody honey falls from the ash tree. Who is there? It's me - Gipsy child but I'm dead now. Hoping I am a shelter for childhood grief, hoping I am a puzzle crossing the enigma to the meaning. However, the distance is ink and this song its rhythm intersects with the war drums. Who else can be the cradle and the grave to me? Who else wasted virility, masturbated in the residues of the mirage? A band of blur blocks the road to innocence, and a chorus of mad people pay attention that the spirit of the priesthood would write the resonance. The child was hiding in the womb of the storm

times took him against the wind and breastfed him from the impossible water, breastfed him aspiration. The opportunity ponders the sea yet it is busy with demolishing the beaches. Whenever we came back we lagged to read our law. How did she let me down and choose to go down to her lower world? How did I get on the wind mutinous never obeying the endings? I put my name on the uniqueness of time littered with aging, while the song was still intersecting with the drum. Hey child, hold on the dawn milk here is purer and these monsters are made of paper. Hey child support me, protect me from anxiety. Vacuum remained lonely No sign of my death nor of the country image. He said these are mad trees extended to stab the sky, the opportunity is for me and this melody that flows from the balcony has details of souls petrified waiting for hope. I said write down: The fire licks the horizon and in the palm a slaughtered moon, then write down: No difference between two kinds of death, this desert is a snake, and your wings are snipped.

Translated by the poet

The Bird of Possibility

Soheil Najm 'Since he did not give us wings , why did he prompt us to fly?' Saint Francis (A novel by Nikos Kazantzakis) They crossed the distance so it was not a coincidence that the bird smelt their bones between the soul and the impossible. The tainted white is their crown their maps, eaten by the past, were fixed on their faces with nails of sorrow. From where will they be taken by the giddiness and where will it lead them? Will they answer to the wind's hunger, or the earth will gather their screams with its eternal carpet bag? Here the bird pecks at the remainder of a dream hidden in the midst of the dust. We asked suddenly: where are our gardens O, madness? There is a terrified tear rolled to become a fossilized wail in the immortal darkness. As if the memory of the bird is searching inside for a theory of a hidden smile in the open air the bell extinguished its ringing leaving nothing but dumb hymns uttered by the bird at a distance from the last echoes.

Tell us you exist in order to live O, hope. The bird flew on a heap of ashes alerted by a rain of smoke washing away the hatred. As if the ends collect themselves to crawl without limbs. They wrapped themselves unwillingly with what they did not want, the grass of memories grew amongst their ribs flowers of bullets and splinters. The time had curdled a night cannot catch up with it, nor a day. The bird grasps the chance with its claws but it soon dissolves. If you were with us you would have stripped us of your denial as darkness turns terror to a wall. If you were if..........if you were, weren't you? The grain of sand says while running under their dreams perhaps the enigma untangles to become feasible extending its hands to the utmost. Hardening in the depression of the nightmare, perhaps every corpse just watch the last of the clouds dragging its bloody tail

and becoming distant declaring a lost sunset pulling children's laughs out of its joy and hanging it as slaughtered wishes. The bird is burning without ashes or tongue or a silent song tracking its shadow. Perhaps they got out of their cemeteries without heads or prayers to keep away from them the denial and the denier. The bird had seen them their limbs are falling in the valleys of inattention and there are no arms imploring only thorny questions in the corners of the eyes. The bird placed its broken wing on a thread of groaning suspended from a swing that leaps between the darkness and light while the sun was a plastic game shaken by a hand of a murdered child buried under the soil.

Translated by: Khaloud Al-Mutalabi Edited by the poet.