Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb’s (d. 1964) transnational experiences defined his poetics and his poetry resonated transnationally. The poet was in Iran during the 1953 coup d’état the American and British intelligence services engineered against Prime Minister Muḥammad Muṣaddiq. According to al-Sayyāb’s own account in his memoir Kuntu shuyūʿiyyan (I Was a Communist, 1959), the refusal of the Iranian Communist Party (the Tūdah) to intervene and protest against the coup led him to sever all ties with the Communists upon his return to Iraq. The coup in Iran caused what I refer to as a “turn” not only in al-Sayyāb’s politics but also in his poetics. The Iranian coup’s effect on al-Sayyāb’s poetic work has been neglected by critics, though his reaction to it is of primary importance for understanding his move from political commitment (iltizām) to a more ambivalent, nuanced, and complicated poetics that interrogates the death-and-rebirth mythic cycles he is known for. By the end of his life, al-Sayyāb stood firmly with the Baʿthist (i.e. Iraqi nationalist but also Arab chauvinist) camp in a stark about-face from his early period of Communist-inspired commitment that transcended national borders. In this paper, I trace the transnational links that shaped al-Sayyāb’s life while I also investigate how al-Sayyāb’s poetry implicitly responds to and resists his explicit political commitment during the first half of the 1950s in my analysis of one of his long poems, al-Asliḥah wa-l-aṭfāl (“Weapons and Children”), published in 1954. A reorientation of current understandings of transnationalism emerges out of my reading of this poem, which requires a redefinition of the processes of “transnationalism-from-above” and “transnationalism-from-below.” While “transnationalism-from-above” is usually understood in terms of capitalist globalization, al-Sayyāb’s experience of Communist transnationalism--which worked to restrict local nationalist movements and align them with the Soviet cause--complicates this view. I therefore offer a new take on the concept of “transnationalism-from-above” through my reading of al-Sayyāb’s life and art.