Michael H. Levin
Baghdad Nights
We gave them all our dreams—the magic carpet, the Arabian Nights. They used them for Disney films and brought us their tanks and their snipers.
—Aziz Hassan, Iraqi poet (February 2016)
Night shimmies along the Street of Books
over flat rooftops that promise relief
from crushing heat, disrupted
intermittently by bursts
of small-arms fire.
Aladdin’s dream—that magic swirl of hope
where chance aligns and fortunes fall from trees,
once graspable in blue-tiled mosques
and arching passageways—is now consigned to
splintered palms, dry rubble piles.
His name was Allah-Din; but magic
comes obscured these days—small expectations
mixed with dust. What rises is uncertainty.
Each alley has gone blind. The nomad moon
hangs motionless, resigned.
Michael H. Levin is the author of the poetry collections Man Overboard (Finishing Line Press, 2018) and Watered Colors (Poetica Publishing, 2014). His work has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Adirondack Review, and Crosswinds, among other journals and anthologies. Levin works as an environmental lawyer and solar energy developer, and lives in Washington DC. See michaellevinpoetry.com.
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