Brian Turner
The Mutanabbi Street Bombing
The Mutanabbi Street Bombing
March 5, 2007
In the moment after the explosion, an old man
staggers in the cloud of dust and debris, hands
pressed hard against bleeding ears
as if to block out the noise of the world
at 11:4,0 A.M., the broken sounds of the wounded
rising around him, roughened by pain.
Buildings catch fire. Cafes.
Stationery shops. The Renaissance Bookstore.
A huge column of smoke, a black anvil head
pluming upward, fueled by the Kitah al-Aghani, al-Isfahani's Book of Songs, the elegies of Khansa, the exile poetry of Youssef and al-Azzawi,
religious tracts, manifestos, translations
of Homer, Shakespeare, Whitman, and Neruda—
these book-leaves curl in the fire's
blue-tipped heat, and the long centuries
handed down from one person to another, verse
by verse, rise over Baghdad.
As the weeks pass by, sunsets
deepen in color over the Pacific. Couples
lie in the spring fields of California,
drinking wine, making love in the lavender
dusk. There is a sweet, apple-roasted
smell of tobacco where they sleep.
They dream. Then wake to the dawn's
early field of lupine—to discover themselves
dusted in ash, the poems of Sulma
and Sayyab in their hair, Sa'di on their eyebrows,
Hafiz and Rumi on their lips.
In memory of Mohammed Hayawi