Dunya Mikhail

In this wasy he makes music.
He lifts his hands to the clouds and braids her tears into a flower.
In this way he sings.

A wave breaking outside the sea.
In this way I go on.

Poetry is my homeland and my religion. The first emotional connection I could make with my new place, when I moved to America, was the moment I went back to writing. It was about a year or so after my arrival. I think it was the poem titled 'I was in a hurry' that I wrote first here. It starts with the words 'yesterday I lost a country.' I noticed that wherever I was (even on an airplane over cities I knew or did not know), just being with poetry, I felt at home. There is that sense of belonging unconditionally. You witness your two special lands (the old one, Iraq, and the new one, America) fighting each other. It's only in poetry you can yell at them both to stop. They may still not stop despite your good poetical yelling, but where else can you give life to that voice that takes no side?


My mother is a Catholic who never misses Sunday Mass, but I went to church with my father only two times a year, on Christmas and Easter. I didn't, however, learn that I was a Christian until my communion time, when I was nine. During my teenage years I read the Bible and the Quran. I was reading everything that I could read out of curiosity and just for the love of reading. What I loved in the Bible was its stories, the symbols and the signs I found full of poetry. what I loved in the Quran was the musicality of language. When I was in college, I worked on writing a new religious book that took the best of those two books and created a third. But that writing was not good enough to put in the one suitcase I took with me when I left Iraq.


In biology class, my teacher taught us about amoebas. 'An amoeba has an eye and a foot,' she said, 'but it doesn't have a real form. You can draw it any way you like.' So I discovered poetry as an amoeba: it has an eye for witnessing, a foot for leaving traces, and a flexible form.


With poety, I feel I am in love. With prose, I feel I am in a marriage.


Doctors know a lot about disease and witness a lot of problems, but all they do is give you a small piece of paper with a prescription. Poets do the same. But doctors can heal you. Poets can only give you x-rays so that you see your wound.