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By Kazhal Ebrahim Khidre:
Translated and introduced by Yasin Aziz: “Two years ago, in March, I was in Halabja and I came across this poem in Klil Kurdish Magazine. I found it so powerful. It seems to tell the whole story of what happened to South Kurdistan in our recent history.
“I don’t know this poet, but I felt I shared what she says. When I read it the first time, it made me shiver …”
For tens of times
I went back to the season of loneliness. I am the heart of a left out orchard full of tears,
a graveyard with no birds, no glowing moon. I have met a girl with no name or address
Many times I have passed through the dark autumn of romance
So often they came across their own death in the mad ocean of waves.
I am not a trespasser into an orchard full of flowers of life
I have come from the spring of blood, I feel like I am in the left out boat
After calmed down waves of a raged sea, it is now serene…
The greyness of my hair is like glitters of the water stream,
My instinct is like a dropped leaf. I have come holding no pass,
from a hell into the flames of another.
From the edge of a plain that was ornamented with flowers
of wounds, mixed with dark shades of a broken-hearted butterfly.
I was born and came. I have not come just by chance, I came in
the freezing winter with torrential rain, From a collapsed town, derelict and abandoned,
that was where I was born.
In order to wear the mourning black dress as my father left.
A poem came in black like a dress to enclose me, I cried like a bird
A breeze of music, a foreigner narrated to me.
I have not come just by myself
to be in the world of broken-heartedness with pain,
The burnt out corpse of a woman from Halabja. That became like ash coal of anger that made me rewrite their inflictions.
I have not come to be a caught up prisoner, I heard cries of poor children of Kirkuk, that made me. get into the world of struggle like little beautiful girls of Qandil.
If one day I happened to disappear from my town
Ask the cherry trees of Seiwan Cemetery,
where the autumn leaves scattered and fallen,
I might be visiting a martyr’s grave, if you can’t find me, I might be in
The collapsed alleys of Qlladiza town, at the house of Pakiza, who
was the victim of the Garmyian Anfal / Auschwitz campaign.
If you still couldn’t find me, I might have become a white pigeon
Or a bird to sing for the tall figure of this nation, or I might have become
A tender poem for a headstone of the graveyard,
like a dropped bud of a dear wrinkled flower…..
By Kazhal Ebrahim Khidre
Translated by Yasin Aziz
