Editor’s Note: To mark Kurdish History Month, we’ll be sharing poems by Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar Sarwa Azeez—one poem each week throughout March. Our thanks to Sarwa for sending her work.

Sarwa Azeez

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time
—Elie Wiesel

A Letter from Rojava

Dear World,

If you sell me to a museum,
kindly place my severed parts
behind glass.
Annotate the mushroom cloud
hovering over my history.
Display the knife
lodged in a sliced land.
Hang my grief
along the walls.
Play my exiled songs loud
until the space turns indigo.
Show that these bones
are not composed of myth.
But do not place “was”
after “this genocide.”
There is no space for “was”
in the grammar
of a million mourning hearts.

Sarwa Azeez is a Kurdish poet, translator, and Fulbright scholar with an MA in English Literature at Leicester University and an MFA from Nebraska-Lincoln University. She is a Pushcart prize nominee and her debut poetry collection, Remote, was published in the UK by 4Word in 2019. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Parentheses Journal, Collateral Journal, the other side of hope, Genocide Studies and Prevention Journal, Feral Journal, and elsewhere.