Poet Dunya Mikhail, who fled from Iraq after the end of the Gulf war, revisits the country through the lines of her poetry.

Soon after the Gulf War ended, Dunya Mikhail had to flee from the country. She was being questioned about Saddam Hussein's government and her writing was being labeled as subversive by the media. The poet had no other option than to leave Iraq. She escaped through Jordan and finally arrived in the U.S., which she now calls home.

However, the author reveals that she never really left Iraq mentally and always revisited it through her poems. Ten years after the start of the Iraq War, Mikhail joins NPR to read some of her poetry, talk about the bond she still feels with Iraq, and explain why she's never gone back.

On how she remembers Iraq after more than 17 years

"The way that things come to mind, I feel that they are more as fragments. They are strange. They don't come in order anymore, so the happy moments and the sad moments climb over each other: our home in Baghdad with the roof where we would sleep [during] summer nights and we would go down when we [heard] the sound of the siren; the simple heater in the middle of our living room that was called Aladdin, and, on it, that pot of tea with cardamom.

"And I remember my father dying in front of my eyes. I remember the windows of our classrooms shaking from explosions. You know, the war was like the norm."

On how poetry reveals wounds, rather than healing them

"I still feel that poetry is not medicine - it's an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it. We all feel alienated because of this continuous violence in the world. We feel alone, but we feel also together. So we resort to poetry as a possibility for survival. However, to say I survived is not so final as to say, for example, I'm alive. We wake up to find that the war survived with us."

On why she hasn't returned to Iraq

"A lot of people ask me this, and the way I feel towards this is really strange. I feel that I woke up from a dream, and going back to Iraq is like asking me will I see the same dream if I go back to sleep? It's strange.

"But I keep contact to maybe have some trace of that old dream or experience. And I find that Iraqis all have one dream, and that is to live a normal life and to die a normal death."