Before we get to the vote, I wanted to first apologize for the delay in posting. This month has been particularly difficult for me personally. Since we’re so late with the vote, we’ll be reading the book from Iraq for October. Moving forward, please know that the vote will be posted by the 15th of every month.
To start us off, I’ve included a powerful poem written by a native of Baghdad who lived there until the authorities considered her poetry to be not as innocent as it originally looked. She then fled to the US where she has since published two collections of poetry that also include works about the wars she had experienced: the Iraq–Iran war of 1980–88 and the first Gulf War of 1992 one of which is included below.
“What good luck!
She has found his bones.
The skull is also in the bag
the bag in her hand
like all other bags
in all other trembling hands.
His bones, like thousands of bones
in the mass graveyard,
His skull, not like any other skull.
Two eyes or holes
with which he saw too much,
two ears
with which he listened to music
that told his own story,
a nose
that never knew clean air,
a mouth, open like a chasm,
it was not like that when he kissed her
there, quietly,
not in this place
noisy with skulls and bones and dust
dug up with questions:
What does it mean to die all this death
in a place where the darkness plays all this silence?
What does it mean to meet your loved ones now
With all of these hollow places?
To give back to your mother
on the occasion of death
a handful of bones
she had given to you
on the occasion of birth?
To depart without death or birth certificates
because the dictator does not give receipts
when he takes your life.
The dictator has a skull too, a huge one
not like any other skull.
It solved by itself a math problem
that multiplied the one death by millions
to equal homeland.
The dictator is the director of a great tragedy.
he has an audience, too,
an audience that claps
until the bones begin to rattle ¬
the bones in the bags,
the full bag finally in her hand,
unlike her disappointed neighbor
who has not yet found her own.”
THE VOTING
You can vote from now until Fri., Sept. 27 11:30PM on which book you’d like the club to read next. (That's NYC time. See this converted to your local time below.)
To participate:
1. Review the books.
2. Then, click here to vote.
We'll publish the anonymous results afterwards.