Poems
Löcker Verlag 2016
On Origins · on Love · on Death
Poems
With drawings by Rima Al-Juburi
“You Talking to Me” deals with the ideas and emotions of homeland, with identity, finding traces, and memory.
“Perfectly poetical and brutally beautiful!”
(ZDF on Susanne Ayoub)
1001 FLIGHT BANS
The sky above Baghdad
belongs to the stars,
the birds,
the wind.
Not to airplanes.
The sky above Baghdad
is a poem.
A PHOTO GOES ROUND THE WORLD
The man on his back
looks into the sky
without seeing it
Smiling mouth
fine-looking teeth
dynamite in his hand
he is dead
Name Bibi. Age twenty.
A perpetrator. A victim.
A murderer.
Explanations
necessary or inevitable
people talk of
punishment
He died for justice
his father says
for a better world
The poems are illustrated by the painter Rima Al-Juburi, who shares a story with the author: both of them were born into Muslim and Christian family arrangements, and both now live in Vienna.
Rima Al-Juburi, born in Wels, Austria, in 1968, grew up in Baghdad. After studying architecture at the University of Baghdad she moved to Vienna, where she lives today as a freelance painter and art designer. She established the arts and crafts studio “Seven Eyes“.