from "Light Comes from Granada," Abdul Wahab al-Bayati

I curl up like an infant, to be reborn in the drops of rain falling on the Arabian desert, but the wind of the East twists my neck. I return an orphan to the cave of Hira'. An eagle snatches me up, releases me under another sky. I curl up once again, but this time I am not reborn. I transcend the human condition. I circle alone around God and his dwellings on earth. I am pursued by the sound of a violin made to tremble in the night by hundreds of lovers haunted by the flame of birth. I try to stop myself at the broken, vibrating string, but the music transports me. I cry out at the climax. A rhythm, accompanied by a human sob, bursts forth now and fades away. The blood of a blind musician flows over the strings. Like me, he raises his hand in the silence of the void. He searches for something lost. He circles alone around God. He crites out with the voice of my mouth or his own. The cliamx carries him to the trough of the wave. He weeps beneath the sky of another country But the strings continue to pursue me in the silence of the hall. Which of us is now born in this desert?

From Love, Death, and Exile, translated by Bassam K. Frangieh.

al-Bayati was a native Iraqi who went into exile after criticizing the monarchy in the 1950s and was ultimately stripped of his citizenship by Saddam Hussein's regime forty years later. An article from a 2002 issue of Humanities puts al-Bayati's pioneering free verse in the broader context of Arabic poetry's history. Read an excerpt from "Iraqi Poem."