ILA Magazine
Where Culture Meets Creativity
Poetry of Mubeen Khishany
RETURN
For the soul, when it has been taken the body off, is justification of blindness.
And for the empty body...is the darkness.
And from your genius lurk
To leave luminous traces
To track your absence butterflies
Everything you abandoned becomes a garden,
This is the secret of the light in my corpse
my fingers are still candles despite my evanescence
And my forehead is a bird's nest,
My eyes close to a living insight
My mouth is a dead bulbul and a history of singing.
This fate is a merciful death...
and this is the biography of the body you leave. Artwork above is by the Poet, Mubeen Khishany. The Reading of Eradication
I had ancestors shorten the night by singing,
and drove away the cold by dancing,
they gave to nature new secrets.
And they melted from iron as much as they disappeared.
Therefore, I was born transparent and adamant.
I carry from the senses the number of my questions, knowing the magic and its words
so I realized your invisible touch
In places where you didn't exist.
And I knew that you were arising from endurance
so I became its verse
And I noticed that the desire for all my attitudes
is to finding you
and the gladness was your embodied in the things around me.
You were in the wind until you pulled me with your sense of seeking
to the chaos of your place.
I was the sound until the leaping of the body from my body
to following you to the point of inevitable danger.
As the adrenaline rises,
And your smooth body descends on the plain,
bending like a wave of light
with your hair on the grass which gives the meaning for silk.
I ask you... How many women were melted inside you
so you did arise?
Does the light know?
that you
are being poured from a hole in it?
To nothing but you in this calm darkness
Here is the word that you say to open in you the pores of the morning,
and ask you
who am I?
Who am I and the dawn draws its black water,
and drink your milk?
Who am I really
right in front of your face
and his wounding sun?
I had ancestors who did not know you
But they have speculations
that the flower which is on your neck
is told my slaughter
I ask you...
How many times should I have died on this whiteness?
How many times should I have written with my blood on your breasts?
How many deaths do I need to be born from you?... Mubeen Khishany is an Iraqi poet and artist, born in 1998, graduated at the Faculty of Engineering. He has one poetry book ("Snatched from the Hand of Comfort"), the book that won the Al-Rafidain Prize for the first book. One of the founders of the Maska Magazine, his poems have been translated into Italian, Persian and English. The poems above are in the author's new book and he has kindly granted ILA Magazine permission to feature here, on our Blog.