From Joseph Skelly, writing on NRO in November:

For the moment, let us pause again to recall the victims of Saddam Hussein. His next trial will focus on the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, including the chemical attack on the small town of Halabja on March 16, 1988. The grisly fate of those villagers, including countless children, has haunted the imagination of the civilized world ever since, including the Iraqi poet Bulland al-Haydari. The closing lines of his poem, “So That We Do Not Forget,” written in the wake of that atrocity, foretell Sunday’s sentence, and discern, in its inherent justice, a glimmer of hope for his homeland:
Not a narcissus dreaming of blooming in the flower bed The villains didn’t leave Only the dead, the ashes of the dead, and the blackness of smoke. But my future And the reckoning of the dead And the blood of the slain will chase the face of Satan From one mirror to another From a thousand ages to a thousand ages. The rope will coil around the neck of the hangman Kurdistan will curse your past Baghdad will disavow your vice And to the sweet land will return all the beds of narcissus and flowers And my son will be reborn in all the children.