When I draw the sparrows of paradise, I can feel and see them flying into my room standing, on my stand, singing and chirping, swooping at my paintings. They color themselves with the colors they like, I can see them , feel them, hear them singing while I’m drawing them.
I hope they forgive me for the pain I caused them when I was a child.
I was not a bad boy, I was lonely, I couldn’t grow wings and fly with them to the blue sky.
I hunted them with a mouse trap and wanted them to stay in my childhood garden and be my friends so we could play with my mother’s roses and daffodils together.
This book contains most of my paintings up until 2018 along with my poems and short stories, which are all based on my own real life experiences starting from my sad land Kurdistan and then to the other sad lands such as Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sierra Leone and Liberia and Japan, that I have lived and worked in as a humanitarian aid worker.
Simko Ahmed
2018