Fawzi Karim

Fawzi Karim Poems

Fawzi Karim Biography

Born in Baghdad in 1945 and now living in London, Fawzi Karim is an influential and much-loved poet of an exiled generation of Iraqi intellectuals who escaped Baathist censorship. Karim's sense of exile began long before his arrival in London, when he found himself alienated by the ideological movements sweeping across his country. He has since established a reputation as a major figure in contemporary poetry. Plague Lands, first book of poems in translation, was awarded a Poetry Book Society recommendation in 2011 and has been described as an elegy for the life of a lost city, a chronicle of a journey into exile and the deep history of an ancient civilisation.)

The Best Poem Of Fawzi Karim

The Forgotten City

Late afternoon.
The houses are shaded in the lightest of pencil strokes.
Birds have flown, nests long abandoned.
Wind flourishes its whips of cold, freezing the tongue;
Echoes of footfalls; leaves falling;
Rags and tatters of newsprint.
Birds have flown, their nests long abandoned.
You too, o errant sand dweller,
Have left nothing but footprints,
Having stared at the waves too late, and for too long.
Once the sun burnt the wrist of the city.
Now it has cooled to a silver bracelet,
Worn once, now long gone, my forgotten lady.

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