All tears have homes.
I’ve never read about a homeless tear
nor have I met any of them rolling around in the streets
or seen a flood that resulted
from an outpouring of weeping.
Abboud al Jabiri
The Iraqi poet and translator, ABBOUD AL JABIRI, was born in Najaf in 1963. A member of the Iraqi Writers' Union and the Arab Writers' Union, he was one of the founders of the Iraqi Youth Literature forum. His five poetry collections are Index of Faults (2007) and Lean on his Blindness (2009), The Museum of Sleep (2012), The Hand's First Thought (2015) and The Colouring of the Enemies (2017). Since 1993 he has been living and working in Amman, in Jordan.
Three Poems
Standing at the Empty Mouth
by Abboud Aljabiri,
translated from the Arabic by Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp
He was as calm as his family wanted,
managing a laugh each day of his life
and washing the traces away
with soap and water
