“The Terrible Years.”
A Poem by Carolina Ebeid

January wears two faces—
you will call one future, the other

history, both are elsewhere:
the elsewhere of photographs,

in which memory turns angular, deckle-edged:
here in the gold film light of Baghdad,

1976, my father, young, ambitious, radical,
on his way to take a picture with Saddam,

or the elsewhere of a quince orchard, the nothing
gentle elsewhere of dashcam footage,

the elsewhere in the street view
of the former house aglow in the palm—

I remember the elsewhere of Peter Jennings’s voice
reporting from Baghdad, and the Round City

of Baghdad with its mechanical birds, their wind-
powered throats, notes from a tree made entirely

of gold—another elsewhere, another history—

Put your ear to this window,
the city’s pleural rub—

All the horrible days arriving—listen—
children stretch their spans

before tombstones practicing fame,
pretending corpse life

which autocorrects to copse life,
an elsewhere where corpses begin to flower—

For a decade my father shouted in his sleep,
words as darts nicking the velvet

dark around the ears—
An elsewhere takes up
its red residence in his head—

Throw open now a dream-
brain up on the screen, see how it dims

and shimmers, a city of quadrants and zones—
It thinks it is awake, the dream
corrected by daylight.

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From Hide by Carolina Ebeid. Copyright © 2026. Available from Graywolf Press. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Graywolf Press. All rights reserved.