A mole and an engraving on the heart

Passing along the sea every day, walking leisurely, the road is not long enough to accomplish what she has to, the sea knows her well, I know her and I know the sea, in all of this, there is always a scar that does not go away, an engraved heart.

All girls dream of the moon, all men dream of harbors, of reaching what cannot be considered the end of love, the end of joy, the dream of an engraving that does not change, may become less glamorous with the days, may be forgotten as everything, but never fades away.

She told me that I was “obviously sad and tired”.

I did not answer, I was tattooed with silence and disappointment, I swallowed my sadness and kissed her shadow, I was like the remnants of the smell of rural grandmothers, like the voice of Nazem al-Ghazali, singing “Shama w dakka bel hanak”, “A mole and an engraving on the chin”.

And bought it.

Then everything ends, and the voice of Nazem al-Ghazali remains “Khayyif aleha, Talfan Beyha”, “Scared for her, admiring her”.

Everything is becoming Iraq, for those who drink the night with the sound of its old songs, or break their glasses in the river Tigris, imagine that you are walking without an identity, crying because you are nobody, you will be a lonely Iraq, even if it is large and wild, it will be blotchy on the face of the roads. And the asphalt of a diaspora that gathers all around sadness.

You had enough scars on your bones, leaving their traces, when life threw you from its sieve to walk to distant harbors, without reaching them, the engraving on the bone is the art of life in this part of the earth, writing the names of those who departed and passed through, even If they stay, they are all passers-by, like the movement of the needle that draws tattoos.

Every day I enter a room where they make tattoos, they say it will be as you like, I do not know what I love, I said once, I want a drawing that looks like my mother, always sad, I did not find anything like my mother, I felt an image of disappointment in my chest, it was the alienation. And it was bigger than me and my mother, and than anything could be painted.

In our village, tattooing on women’s breasts was the most precious tattoo. The lover sat in the night milling the grains on the molar, watching the wheat and her eyes. Shining in a night that is as far as this moon, as big as this sea, was the chest tattoo.

Then the lover becomes a field, becomes an endless love season.

The comrades tattoos in the streets, “Bless me, my mother”, “Sadness, don’t come near me” are all exaggerated vocabulary, such as paints of a phoenix or a picture of Guevara

Those whom you love cannot be drawn, their existence becomes a hidden name, which everyone sees, there is no need to show it, like saying that you are happy in this dirty planet means that you are a strange tattoo printed before us, we who passed through his roads and painted with urine engravings that are worthy of this filth, which is our land, our planet that was not swallowed by the meteor.

I do not enter a place to make tattoos, I do not know how these rooms are. As it does not pass along the sea, the road is long enough for everything, I know the sea well, like a tattoo of my disappointment, the tattoo that always beats in the left side of my chest, with all these scars and memory.

Mohammad Haj Hussein

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