There is a road

Adorned with ceilings

Washed by memory

until they are white

Under a sky at the apex of its agony

Where I walk

Where my words want to rise like the stairs of a castle

Like sounds ascending the lost scale

One note after another

In my friend’s notebook

The oud player who died of his own silence in the desolation of exile

I find that sound

I find the building and open a door to it:

Our time; how it lost its tickets!

It is flowing in the dark

Like a tiny stream of voices

The voices of those who no longer have a voice

They told me

that they had demolished Sindibad Cinema

What a loss!

Who will sail now?

Who will meet the old man at sea?

They demolished those evenings

Our white shirts, Baghdad summers

Spartacus, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Samson and Delila

How will we dream of travelling now?

And to which island?

They demolished Sindibad Cinema 

Heavy with water

is the hair of the drowned man

Who returned to the party

After they turned off the lights

Piled the chairs on the barren riverbank

and chained the waves of the Tigris

 * * *

[Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon. The first three poems are from Sargon Boulus, Hamil al-Fanus fi Laylal-Dhi’ab (The Lamp Carrier in the Wolves’ Night) (Cologne: Dar al-Jamal, 1996) pp. 71, 84, and 85. “An Elegy for Sindibad Cinema” (Martiya ila Sinama al-Sindibad) is from Azma Ukhra li-Kalb al-Qabila (Beirut/Baghdad: Dar al-Jamal, 2008) pp. 173-174]