Two sweet, short poems by Pashew

Abdullah Pashew was born in 1946 in Hawler (Erbil), the current capital of Iraq's Kurdistan Region. He studied at the Teachers Training Institute in Erbil. In 1973 he went to the former USSR where six years later, he earned a Master of Arts in pedagogy, specializing in foreign languages. In 1984 the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences awarded him a Ph.D. in Philology. From 1985 to 1990 he lectured at Alfatih University in Libya.

Since 1995 he has lived in Finland. His first poem was published in 1963, his first collection in 1967. Since then he has published 8 collections, the latest, Baraw Zardapar (Towards the Twilight) was published in Sweden in 2001. He has also translated many distinguished writers and poets, in particular Walt Whitman and A. S. Pushkin.

Pashew has written on a wide range of themes in his poems which encompass love poems, political poems, educational poems and more. 

Two Goings                                                                                               Power

late afternoons,                                                                                 My pen is a hammer, 

I watch the sun go down                                                                 each of my words a nail,

I know that, sooner or later,                                                            injustice wherever it be

I must go, too                                                                                 I will pierce it like timber.

But alas my going                                                                                    --- 21 August 1993 Moscow

won't make as magical 

a scene as sunsets do

         --- 7 July 2000 Helsinki 

                                                              (Translation by Raber Y. Aziz)