Anwar Kader Muhammad

International Journal of Kurdish Studies, Jan, 2004

Born in Arbat, in the Sulaimani province of Kurdistan in 1948, he studied Kurdish language and literature at the University of Baghdad. He worked as a journalist and editor in Baghdad's Kurdish Academy of Science. Subsequently he earned a PhD in Kurdish literature at the University of Leningrad. Since 1988 he has made his home in Sweden. He has published two poetry collections: Tempest, Baghdad 1977; Echo, Stockholm 1988.

QUESTION

You ask me: from which sweet sea do you come?
That your whole body is a rain of white honey,
under which bright sun have you grown up?
That your eyes and your hair are such dark,
your mouth, your hands and your whole body are flame and heat?
You ask me: the blowing tempest in your breast,
from what mountain is it?
And the fog that covers your face,
for whom of the lovers is it?
O, beautiful girl!
I come from a soil,
where every year thousands like Farhad die
without kissing the lips of Shirin ... *

LOVE

In the rainstorm nights of sin,
the torch of a far away fire is visible.
It is my desperate and pure love
that has become the song of the lovers
And the people of the city.

SOMETIMES

Sometimes poetry,
like a highway,
like a narrow footpath in moonlight,
pours in the village of my suffering heart,
like a spark glides into
the silent home of my notebook.

Translated by Farhad Shakely