Photo Caption

Amid nation-wide destruction this statue of Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab (1926-1964) in Shatt Al-Arab, in his home town of Basra, remains unscathed. One of Iraq's, and the Arab world's, greatest modern poets, Al-Sayyab often wrote of exile. He spent much of his life outside Iraq, an experience that metamorphosed into a sublime and elegiac discourse in which mother and homeland, pain and grief, are identified. Adorning the statue are these lines:

The sun, more beautiful in my country than elsewhere and the dark
Even the dark there is more beautiful; it embraces Iraq
The pity, when will I sleep
To feel where my head rests
Dew drops with your summer scent, Iraq?
Among villages scared by my step
And foreign cities
I sang your beloved earth
And bore it, Christ bearing his cross in exile

photo: Galal Nassar