The Tigris Lands

Mounds of buried villages float in valley mist,

Listless horizon disintegrates to dust,

Autumn stubble blows absentmindedly over undulations,

Whose barley once enriched the Assyrians,

And sheep flock from dawn to dusk.

Look before sunrise across the Tigris lands

Towards the Hakkiori mountains erupting, uncoiling,

Beneath an orange rim their amethyst veils,

Shot through with flashing tremors.

Lily-coloured cumuli, involved as conches,

Meditate in the sharp clean heavens,

Fortress bastions float in the distance...

World begins to heave, groan and sunder,

Fire-mists writhing above the ranges,

And from chaos the Tigris and the Western Habur

Coil out toward the sun, wandering apart,

Where wind and water lay the rock bare.


Clairvoyant-white, streaked with scintillation, Lake Van

Breathes ethereal light, in which the sky’s attention

Transmit instantaneously to the heart,

And the planets at night leap from their stations,

Stars’ slow dying spreads sheen across the lake.


Nightfall in the Zab Valley, flaming crags

Close in, summits in dark conflagration,

As the mountain masses crumble away,

Pleating in shale-slumps in the abyss,

Baseless and shifting as a madman’s mind.

The sun spins silk webs across the precipices,

Gaunt lacework trembling in the light.

The Zab defile, vortex of mist and crags,

Winds fathomless as prophetic dreams,

As you leave and cross the watershed

Through steep pastures smoked with blue thistles,

And sup at a cold spring where hoopoes

Flop in the hollows, and partridges lead

Their brood across the boulders.


To contemplate the world from horseback,

Knowing that silence is truthfulness,

Jogging through a vale of wild pears and vines,

Under cobalt morning sky!-

And so, at the watershed, the land breaks

Westward, Judi Dagh’s long promontory

Flickers, and, there, a the remote tip

Of a ravine, stands the simple chapel

Marking Noah’s emergence from the Ark.

Momentous as a kingfisher’s wing,

The Tigris curves through warm light air,

Elysian plains rise, rich grasses flaring,

Dark soil primed with red moons.