I Want Those Photos

I want those photos.
Alia stood grand;
the most beautiful Iraqi model we knew,
and met in San Francisco,
when the Iraqi Fashion House had a house…
She had more than one face, and a multitude of minds,
the psychiatrist, at Stanford, said…
but that did not make her less glamorous,
or her Babylonian clothes less glowing.

I really want those photos.
But the House fell down upon them.
It came down with a US missile,
that tore into Alia’s clothes,
and ripped the entity
of her Babylonian history!

Now, they’re nowhere to be found.
I can’t ask for them,
for now with the changes of times,
in my homeland,
the ‘insurgents’ will label them ‘haram’.

I also want to visit Ms. Siba,
in that old house, in Adhamia.
The one in the corner,
by the noisy highway,
where sometimes, we just couldn't sit on the patio,
at night
because car headlights flashed at our eyes…
But the house was rented to an ‘insurgent’.

Ms. Siba left this life, in Amman.
She still visits the house at night,
and tells him about Palestine.
He knows...
He tells her, ‘she keeps him going’ -but, does she?
‘Just spare the innocent lives!’, she cries…
He doesn’t listen.
His sister was raped, at Abu Ghraib,
and she still screams in his dreams…
The ‘insurgent’ is now immune to noise,
even from the nearby highway.

I want those fabrics…in those photos.
I really do…
I want to touch them.
I want to touch them and feel that something,
just one thing of the city I knew has survived…


Note: Alia was Iraq's # 1 model. She was schizophrenic. We all met her in person in 1980, while on a visit to the US -the Iraqi Fashion House had a traveling show.