Today I Am From Iraq Poem by Gert Strydom

The monument to the ruler is pulled down,
trampled under foreign feet
and today you will meet me in the street
and today I am a Muslim, from Iraq
although my blood
is that of a different nation.

Once a child, a man in the street
who had been a soldier,
forced into the army of the fatherland.

Here my house had been bombed
into ruins, shattered like pieces of glass
and where my life once was,
my farm, my business
everything is now looted, busted or broken
as a token of the foreign invasion
and humiliation.

[Reference: Babi Yar by Yevgeny Yevtushenko.]