Death was passing through the pores of waiting
like fresh messages from the sky:
We will survive!
The rain will return, sweet and drinkable, in September.
The children will go to school.
They will read “Home” or “The boy planted a rose” or “The girl fed a cat.”
They will draw houses with large open doors and no fences.
Teenage boys will agree to play a soccer match or bet on a game of billiards.
A girl will smile because she has become taller with prettier eyes.
A shy young man will decide to tell the girl he liked for three years that she is
sweeter than the moment of salvation.
And the girl who forgot her bag on the bus…she will untie her braid in front of the mirror.
The father will hug his children when he comes home from work.
The mother will read them interesting stories before bed.
And the grandma who is always angry… she will sing all day long.
The grocery salesman will get louder
and fear will creep out of the city.
We would have survived
if the war hadn’t swallowed the alleys up, one by one,
and thrown their ruins into us!
ROLLA BARRAQ was born in Mosul in 1985. In 2018, her poetry collection, What Has Arrived from It, won the competition of the General Union of Writers in Iraq. She has a Ph.D. in Arabic literature and lives in Mosul, where she is leader of the Poetry Club.
JEFFREY CLAPP’S poems, stories and translations have appeared in Samovar, North American Review, Blue Unicorn, Dalhousie Review, Arkansas Review, Sycamore Review, and many others. He is a past recipient of the Daniel Morin Poetry Prize at UNH and the Indiana Fiction Prize from Purdue. His work has been anthologized in Best of Blueline and Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America. He currently lives in South Portland, ME USA.
MUNTATHER ALSAWAD studied poetry and criticism in his home country of Iraq, where he taught both college and primary school. He has published poetry and criticism in Arabic, as well as translations from the Arabic into English. A native of Basra, he now lives in the cooler climate of Portland, Maine, where he works at the Portland Museum of Art.
An artist, art writer and guest curator, ELIZABETH JOHNSON began writing reviews for artpractical.com in San Francisco, California, and later covered exhibitions in New York City, Philadelphia, and the Lehigh Valley for theartblog.org. She has written for artcritical.com, Artvoices Magazine, Figure/Ground, PaintersonPaintings.com and DeliciousLine.org. She interviews gallery artists for Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
