This paper analyzes the role of public protest in the drive for national liberation, social justice and economic equality in Iraq by analyzing the popular uprisings of 1948, 1952, and 1956. My research is drawn from a broad array of historical sources, including documents and correspondence from the British National Archives and the U.S. National Archives, local newspapers and journals, retrospective memoirs, and popular poetry. I argue that mid-century demands for reform and revolution were framed by an anti-colonial historical discourse and shaped by Cold War politics. By situating these popular movements within the historical context of regional anti-colonial struggles in Palestine (1947-1948), Iran (1951-1953), and Egypt (1956), I demonstrate the interplay of global and local politics and the refraction of anti-colonial rhetoric and sentiment across both vertical and horizontal solidarities of the nationalist and socialist movements. The chapter devotes particular attention to the use of poetry in the public sphere during these cycles of protest and to the deployment of poetry as both an impetus for popular mobilization and a summation of popular demands. As the principle cultural medium for expressing anti-colonialism and political dissent, Arabic poetry constitutes a fertile ground for historical research due to its tremendous popular resonance and capacity to inflame emotions and ignite rebellions. Attention to this critically overlooked historical source enables a more critical analysis of the testimony of British and American officials and their Iraqi interlocutors. Popular poetry undercuts elite conceptualizations of vertical agency, which posits mass political movements as the product of partisan mobilization campaigns contingent on the personal rivalries of elite political actors. My analysis underscores the cultural implications of poetry as an instrument of subaltern political movements. By analyzing the poems of figures like Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri, Muhammad Saleh Bahr al-?Ulum, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, and ?Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati, publicly composed and delivered in front of crowds of workers, peasants, and students involved in the mass uprisings, I illustrate the capacity of poets to appropriate nationalist legacies of anti-colonialism to reframe public debates about social justice and national liberation through the creative articulation of a new “horizon lit with blood,” as Jawahiri poignantly framed it in the celebrated poem “My Brother Ja?far.”