In my blood, lovers bathe, and with my poetry strangers in exile build Shiraz." From the wound of the poet a homeland is born, and out of love comes a city for strangers. In "The Moon of Shiraz" (1975), the Iraqi poet Abdul Wahab al-Bayati (1926–1999), one of the pioneers of tafila poetry, turns the experience of exile into a vision in which the woman, the city, and the poem intersect. From Baghdad to Cairo, Moscow, Madrid and Damascus, al-Bayati carried his travel anxiety and his bias towards the poor and oppressed, mixing in his poetry a plot of myth and mysticism. In "The Moon of Shiraz", where Hafez al-Shirazi's ink echoes, love becomes a search for shelter, and the phrase "the last exile of a homeland" sums up the tragedy of a poet who turned words into a place of residence. To read the full article Muhammad Nasser Al-Din | Abdul Wahab al-Bayati: The Moon of Shiraz.

In my blood, lovers bathe, and with my poetry strangers in exile build Shiraz." From the wound of the poet a homeland is born, and out of love comes a city for strangers. In "The Moon of Shiraz" (1975), the Iraqi poet Abdul Wahab al-Bayati (1926–1999), one of the pioneers of tafila poetry, turns the experience of exile into a vision in which the woman, the city, and the poem intersect. From Baghdad to Cairo, Moscow, Madrid and Damascus, al-Bayati carried his travel anxiety and his bias towards the poor and oppressed, mixing in his poetry a plot of myth and mysticism. In "The Moon of Shiraz", where Hafez al-Shirazi's ink echoes, love becomes a search for shelter, and the phrase "the last exile of a homeland" sums up the tragedy of a poet who turned words into a place of residence. To read the full article Muhammad Nasser Al-Din | Abdul Wahab al-Bayati: The Moon of Shiraz.