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

Fitting

The day of the air raids
everyone around me placed an index finger
on their lips
don’t make a sound
press into that corner
pretend you are not there
how much I wished I were
the mouse
slipping into dark cracks
vanishing toward nothing
but I survived that day.
I grew larger and larger
until my narratives
could no longer fit into holes.
Sometimes I still try to squeeze into cracks
only to pull my sunken parts back out.

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.

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.

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

Aftermath

Each time he finishes spraying,
picking, or pruning,
he gazes out over the vineyard
as if the buried might rise again.

Before resettlement,
my dad drove a shovel truck
the engine’s growl
tearing through the grey air
along mountain slopes.
He carved roads
that sometimes led
to the darkest destinations.
On his way to work,
he’d pass bodies in uniform –
piles of them
and had to bury them,
war after war
after war.
Now, forty summers on,
dad stands among the vines,
listening for voices
we can never hear.

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.

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

Outliving the Day

Some days stretch so far
I feel I have outlived
a clock bloated with revolutions and genocides.

My insomnia stands like a mountain
from which killed dreams
bleed into the sky.
I keep counting
until minutes turn to ghosts,
until my back becomes a mother’s back,
bent around her child,
limbs loose and pendulous,
head fallen backward
under the weight of war.
Which world
has he crossed into now
whether he is sheltered,
given food and toys,
or told, once again,
he does not belong
to this life.

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.