She comes to me with a bowl of soup when I am besieged by fumes of cheap arak. She comes to me in dusty noons. And with each sunset night snatches she comes to me with an evening star. In the cafes she sits to bitter tea. In the market she sells cheese and buffalo livers. She dusts her used-clothing stores, searching for bones in a bowl of soup, for milk to the lips of a child and a glimmer in a pair of eyes and something a woman does not yet know and streets where water never greens. *** At night she roams among houses abandoned by the poor and churches where a muffled mass fades and huts where poor girls faint. At midnight she returns to her enchanted shelter behind muddy streets, carrying the bread of the dead, myrtle flowers, slivers of buffalo liver and two bones for a bowl of soup. *** At dawn she stops by all her houses, waking all her children, dragging them to the street, the thousands waiting to march on Baghdad. *** 8/4/1975 ______________ Translated by Khaled Mattawa