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Although he died at the age of 38, the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab (1926-1964) was distinguished for his literary innovations in Arab poetry and a pioneer of the free poetry movement. His painful experience of exile is reflected in the following poem. For I am a stranger Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab For I am a stranger Beloved Iraq Far distant, and I here in my longing For it, for her ... I cry out: Iraq And from my cry a lament returns An echo bursts forth I feel I have crossed the expanse To a world of decay that responds not To my cry If I shake the branches Only decay will drop from them Stones Stones - no fruit Even the springs Are stones, even the fresh breeze Stones moistened with blood My cry a stone, my mouth a rock My legs a wind straying in the wastes Translated by Mouna A Khouri and Hamid Algar |
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