WHY DID YOU WASTE MY SHADOW?
ALM No.94, October 2026
POETRY
Next time, I will not be the daughter of a soldier!
He was busy connecting cities with each other,
Sprinkling the warmth of his heart over their names,
But in our house,
There are incomprehensible walls
Ceilings crying out to their land
Windows wanted to assassinate me
A door that insists on that,
And on the furniture of my room,
Wishes alone mourning
Why did you waste my shadow?
There where the wind dried at the gates of cities
The windows of the sky are closed
The trees have nothing to do with their greenery
The streets are barren of their meanings
The passersby stumble with the tails of their sighs
How did you step on the heart of the impossible?!
And how do you walk now without a woman like me?!
Faleeha Hassan is a poet, teacher, editor, writer, and playwright born in 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 30 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, and Macedonian. She is a 2018 Pulitzer Prize nominee and a 2019 Pushcart Prize nominee. 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 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 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.
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