Poem - I am Inanna... Poetess - Faleeha Hassan (Iraq)

About the Poetess:

Faleeha Hassan is a poet, teacher, editor, writer, and  playwright born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967, who now lives in the United States. Faleeha was the first woman to write poetry for children in Iraq. She received her master's degree in Arabic literature and has now published 29 books; her poems have been translated into English, Turkmen, Bosnian, Indian, French, Italian, German, Kurdish, Spanish, Korean, Greek, Serbian, Albanian, Pakistani, Romanian, Malayalam, Chinese, ODIA, Nepali, Macedonian, and Russian.

Three-time best-selling author on Amazon.

Pulitzer Prize Nomination 2018,

PushCaret Prize Nomination 2019.

Member of the International Writers and Artists Association.

Winner of the Women of Excellence Inspiration award from SJ magazine 2020,

Winner of the Grand Jury Award (the Sahitto International Award for Literature 2021)

One of the Women of Excellence selection committees for 2023

Winner of the Women's Arts Award 2023

Member of Who’s Who in America 2023

SAHITTO AWARD, JUDGING PANEL 2023

Winner of the HerStory Award from the Women’s Federation for World Peace, New Jersey, 2024

Winner of the 2025 Naij Naaman Literary Prize.

Winner of the ScreaminMama magazine poetry contest 2025

Cultural Ambassador - Iraq, USA, since 2018

Cultural Ambassador and worldwide literary advisor, PEN CRAFT Bangladesh

Honoured to be appointed as a 2024 Peace Ambassador by the Universal Peace Federation, Member of the Founding Mothers Global Women’s Congress 2024  

I am Inanna...

Faleeha Hassan

(And Eurydice sighed, one last time, when Orpheus turned…)

In the beginning, I did not wish to be.

So, I borrowed a rib from a man

—and that became my first sin.

He, the insolent lord, blessed my murmurs,

placed his hand upon my heart,

and said:

“I shelter you from truth,

And I shelter truth from you.”

Since that day,

Lamps ceased their luminous gossip.

When I gazed into the forest,

I saw a lantern laughing—

And the shadow of a man said,

“Seek truth, but do not touch it.”

His voice echoed like T. S. Eliot's

on a pale afternoon.

The family—shackled by poverty.

The mother possessed.

The father, collector of grief, like he collects furniture.

And their children—

proficient in profanity,

but estranged from words like: hermeneutics, aesthetics, morphology, anthropology.

Far from the internet,

they found joy in warm bread,

cold water, and a room not too hot.

In the mirror, I was a child—

But I was more:

I was Hydra.

Each time a head was severed,

Another bloomed.

And he, the gluttonous one,

moaned with the headaches of my survivals,

As I marveled at still being.

They called me “the child,”

Yet skulls cracked beneath my steps,

And from the fractures emerged

a neighing horse and an angel

lifting her hand toward the clouds

In the hope of plucking a wish

from the tree of eternity

before it falls.

I had no relation to coffin-time,

nor to lecture halls in flames,

nor to students who saw only themselves

In white dresses and imminent weddings.

The bookseller gave me an Argon pen

and said:

“Write what remains of our history.”

So. I wrote to my friend:

“Fear not for the sky,

as long as we hold it up with our fingers.”

But she stopped holding it.

She gathered her fingers,

saw the earth torn,

Choose a patch—New York—

and began to stitch it back together.

In exile,

They opened a small crack in their walls for me

to watch their shadows, stretch across marital mirrors.

And I—

grew wings of a dove,

and flew into the sky of secrets

where no one asks,

“Do you believe me?”

(Ariadne gave him the thread, but he forgot her heart in the maze.)

They said to me:

“Be.”

So, I became a corpse

With two screams nailed into the abyss.

I do not know

from where the heads came—

heads without desire,

writhing like Medusa’s snakes,

But with no eyes to kill them.

I am alive despite death surrounding me.

I twist upon a pavement of skulls

and walk—

The stones split,

and from their wounds

A neighing horse leaps,

and an angel lifts her hand to the clouds,

as if reaching for a fruit of forever.

I have nothing to do with the coffins of time,

nor with the charred clock of university life,

nor with the girls who see only themselves

in white dresses.

I run after a bite of bread,

or a book unread.

The bookseller said:

“Write.

Leave a trace.”

But when I write,

everything around me shrinks,

even love—

into an echo

of a call never answered.

I wrote again to my friend:

“Don’t fear for the sky,

We hold it with our fingers.”

But she gathered her fingers and retreated,

sewing the earth anew,

patch by patch—

like Eurydice climbing from the underworld

only to find she had been forgotten there.

At night,

They searched the walls of my memory,

trying to mold me to their domestic mirrors.

But I soared—

eyes closed—

letting someone stroke my name:

Inanna.

And I imagined him beautiful.

Then—

The world’s leaves began to fall.

“I love you” no longer startled me.

All words fell.

The wind stole my language

and left me ashes.

(Tristan was dying,

Isolde’s ship was late—

He closed his eyes before he saw her sail.)

Before I withdrew to my cloud,

to the mirror stoned with judgment,

I whispered:

What happens, happens.

What doesn’t, will never.

I showed him my armor

crumbling in the lap of smoke.

I said:

“Did you know you were the dearest?”

But hands couldn’t reach,

and the soul trembled—

And what should not happen

always happens.

(That night, Hero did not look to the sea—

and the waves swallowed Leander.)

I was born three times:

1967, beneath the golden spout,

1991, beneath a hail of shells,

2007 in a windowless exile.

Each birth—

a scream

Then a silence.

I had to prove I existed

With more than tears.

I used all my signs

to mend the sky’s torn seam.

In the South,

Homes are wrinkled

like maps abandoned by angry children.

They echo with bomb screams,

Forget my name,

place me on a shelf of ash,

leave me with scraps of prayer,

and a surplus of grief.

The war began—

and never truly ended.

It laid eggs

and birthed black chicks

that pecked at our ears.

“Lady, may I crown you princess?”

“Sir, may I call you beloved?”

But who wove

The shrapnel’s tension

into the threads of speech?

Who cradles the poet’s head

When the poet cannot cradle his own?

Against my will,

I carried myself

to cities of fractured vision—

mornings shattered,

dreams aborted in dumb labor.

In the street,

I bound my hands to society,

chained myself to myself

So. I wouldn’t flee.

I searched for you

In every page of history,

In every name

Starting with your letters

and ending with me.

The airplanes bore me in their bellies

like a shard—

Then spilled me onto the earth,

My age scattering

(Orpheus played,

But Eurydice could not hear him

from beneath the stone.)

I used to keep you

to help me climb toward things.

Who will now tell them

my head has begun to grow again?

Who will gather the vocabulary?

That was scattered with my grandmother,

Who, in dying,

Did you take my alphabet?

Spring foretold my fate

and bloomed red flowers—

But I didn’t know death

until my grandmother swallowed

her final breath.

She was my entire weather.

Since her,

The air turned hard,

flavorless.

They said:

“Carry your corpse,

wipe the dark from the mirror,

prepare to slip.”

The day was blind.

The city—the world’s summary—

asleep.

(Isolde was on the white ship—

But Tristan died before he saw the sail.)

I knocked on the university’s door

With half-burned papers.

It was silent—like a cemetery—

except for the professors.

When they saw me,

they burned the rest.

I gathered my ashes in a white bag,

carried all the vessels of fire.

But the alphabet dimmed.

What do words mean

When the mouth is sewn with endless silence?

I no longer need letters.

I returned to my only one:

You.

The letter of absence.

The letter of thirst.

The letter of the dead eyes

that look at us

from far away.

Exile twists between my fingers.

Since the day my friend said:

“Write me a poem,”

And they pulled her shattered body

from the head of a missile,

The first gardenia fell

into the sand of loneliness.

Forty nights after the last cannon fell silent,

They dug again.

Exhumed her,

laid her in a cemetery instead of our garden.

She bloomed like a gardenia—

born dead.

I whispered to her:

“What frightened you back into dust?”

(Ariadne wept on her island’s shore,

Theseus had forgotten her after the victory.)

You were not with me.

I sent you the names of the departed.

Each time I asked for one,

they said, “God rest their soul.”

What mercy could stretch

to fit all these?

Their shadows played in my memory’s courtyard.

But you—

You were there,

In the capital,

In the library.

I told you:

“They’ve all gone.”

And you wrote me:

“You are like the rose blossom.”

Those were

Your final words—

and the spark of every fire.

(Orpheus played—

But stone-deafened even him.

He heard not his own music.)

(Hero shut her window on the storm—

But the sea still slipped between her fingers.)

I whispered:

“I love you.”

They called me “slow to adapt,”

But I was the only one

who never betrayed her form—

not in war,

not in prison.

I find myself sleeping

on a pillow where a captive lies

Who looks like no one.

I wake

to my own headless memory.

Who stole my head?

Who drags me to the women’s cave?

I used to write to you

to be saved.

But I burned

line by line.

You were the forgotten image

In every mirror.

And I—

marked by war

Since the moment we met.

(Dumuzi had only to rot in the underworld,

and Inanna to rise—alone.)

In the cities with many names:

Baghdad, Najaf, Basra…

My memory walks barefoot,

washing her feet

of sleep’s trace.

You once told me, in a prophecy:

“Perhaps we shall part.

Leave the chair empty,

except for my shadow.”

I believed you.

And I did.

You said:

“We will meet again.

Leave your heart empty,

except for me.”

I believed that, too.

But now I can’t tell

shadow from the heart,

beginning from exile.

The body has learned silence—

in spasms,

In rain that falls

But touches no one.

I am Southern.

Every bomb calls me by name.

I tremble

and hide in books.

In my cells,

paper dreams.

So, I’ve learned to shrink my body

to cast them out—

or expand it

to hold the libraries of Baghdad,

The orchards of Basra,

The Secrets of Najaf.

(Eurydice screamed from the underworld,

But Orpheus didn’t hear—this time.)

They never forgave me

for dozing at childhood’s doorstep.

Kafka visited in his metamorphosis,

told me:

“You won’t survive without a mask.”

Still, I write—

even after they discovered my secret.

I declared:

“I will read the whole library.”

They said:

“A woman reads only silence.”

So, I closed the door on them—

and kept me.

(Ariadne wept on the sand,

and the maze—now without thread—

waited for no return.)

I wanted to see you

In a sky close enough to touch,

In the wind,

In the well.

But I didn’t find you.

I can no longer hold one image

of myself—

In any mirror

or passport.

(And in the end,

Inanna rose from the darkness—

But the light was never the same again.)

Now—

I am only a shadow

walking inward.

I wait for you inside—

where there is no mirror,

no name,

No country.

I wanted to vanish—

to erase myself

from every page.

But the poem

remained.

And within it

remained

a woman

Who forgets the names of bombs,

but remembers

that she once

loved—

In silence.

By Faleeha Hassan