A secret’s ruled by a single wall,
an extinct bird flies in a forgotten legend,
a living totem memorializes a tribe wiped out
by a great wind, a forest of anxiety stretches
meek as a pomegranate, noisy as its rattling seeds—
it’s like a monumental wave, like a statue of the sea.
It’s necessary as the shiver that sleeps in a stranger’s throat,
as the triangular shadow cast between two steps,
as a whirlwind that defeats emptiness,
as a doll’s dress and its thread-stitched head,
as your presence at the beginning of each poem.
It displays more pomp than random chance,
it’s more solid than a ghazal stoned with a thousand hearts
and a single rose, it’s an incomplete ode,
inevitable as an imagined window in an imagined wall,
certain as a rose that will be pulped, long as a hunter’s song.
It’s necessary as the sad death of pawns in a game of chess
which are pleased to be resurrected, as a tear scooped from the sea,
as café tables reserved only for Night, as a carnival throbbing
in the heart of the city, or a funeral canted at hope’s angle.
It’s like days sunk to the bottom of a river, like boats born aloft by floods.
It’s like an impossible quarrel between two opposing days,
or like your map casting a shadow parallel to an invisible planet.

Mohammad Al-Amin is an Iraqi poet and translator residing in the Netherlands. He has published two poetry collections entitled Lanterns and A Letter to Cervantes. His poems have been translated
into several languages. He currently supervises the lazuli Cultural Website. In the field of translation, he translated into Arabic selections of many classical Persian poets such as Omar Khayyam and Hafez Shirazi, and among the contemporaries, Ahmad Shamlu, Sohrab Sepehri, and Forough
Farrokhzad.