Adnan al-Sayegh

Adnan al-Sayegh Poems

Adnan al-Sayegh Biography

Adnan al-Sayegh (born 1955 in Al-Kufa, Iraq), "is one of the most original voices from the generation of Iraqi poets known as the Eighties Movement. His poetry, crafted with elegance, and sharp as an arrowhead, carries an intense passion for freedom love and beauty. Adnan uses his words as a weapon to denounce the devastation of war and the horrors of dictatorship." In 1993 his uncompromising criticism of oppression and injustice led to his exile in Jordan and the Lebanon. After being sentenced to death in Iraq in 1996, because of the publication of Uruk's Anthem, a long poem in which he gives voice to the profound despair of the Iraqi experience- he took refuge in Sweden. Since 2004 he lives in London. In the Spring of 2006, Adnan al-Sayegh read his poems at the third Al-Marbed Poetry Festival in Basra, Iraq. The poems upset the intolerant armed militia and al-Sayegh was threatened with death and with having his tongue cut out. He was forced to leave Basra in haste and through Kuwait to return to his exile in London. Adnan is a member of the Iraqi and Arab Writers Unions, the Iraqi and Arab Journalists Unions, the International Journalist Organization, the Swedish Writers Union and the Swedish Pen Club. He has received several international awards; among them, the Hellman - Hammet International Poetry Award (New York 1996), the Rotterdam International Poetry Award (1997) and the Swedish Writers Association Award (2005), and has been invited to read his poems in many festivals across the world. His poems have been translated into English, Swedish, Spanish, French, German, Romanian, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, Persian and Kurdish.)

The Best Poem Of Adnan al-Sayegh

Under A Strange Sky

A difficult equation
To divide yourself between two girls
Between two countries
Of police and pineapples
Between the two, you cling to a bottle
In a bar, with cockroaches leaping about.
Once you had the words, your path to the palm trees
From where did they come with their walls ?
You turned aside to watch
The light of the distant masts
Rising and falling
Between the sobs and the sighs.
A bitter equation
To remain as you are,
Tossed upon the sand
Sketching a horizon, then erasing it
a flash of lightning, then removing it.
The near sky is more desirable
The distant sky … more beautiful
But the guards' boots
Will bar you from the realm of nostalgia which twines
between the blossoms of your heart and the window.
A difficult equation
To exchange a dream for an illusion,
A woman for another
An exile for an exile.
And I ask :
Where is the path ?!

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