This paper will consider the idea of landscape by way of the work of two Iraqi poets Badr Shakir as-Sayyab and Saadi Youssef. I will argue that as-Sayyab’s most famous poem “Inshudat al-Matar” (Song of the Rain, 1960) has become the emblematic text through which several Arab poets (e.g., Darwish, Youssef and Antoon) have meditated on contemporary Iraq. In particular, I will examine the way in which Youssef’s poem, “Amreeka Amreeka” (1995) draws on the alternating dystopic imagery of as-Sayyab’s poem (landscapes of drought, famine, date palms and ruinous floods) alongside images of wartime aggression and devastation (neutron bombs, Tomahawk missiles, television cameras, and American soldiers). In Youssef’s work the iconic imagery of Americana (jazz, jeans, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman) brought into relief against the chaotic warscape of Iraq during the American invasion in 1991 is eclipsed in the last few stanzas by a nostalgic recuperation of the country as a lost idyll of date palms, mulberry trees, and pomegranate blossoms, “butchered, pummeled, and drowned” in the aftermath of war. To this end, both poems are constructed as lyrical lamentations for a vanished idyllic space. Yet where as-Sayyab’s poem implicitly references the failure of an Arab leadership to speak to Iraq’s suffering, Youssef explicitly addresses an American reader. Ultimately Youssef takes as-Sayyab’s anguished anthem for Iraq and weaves within it the imagery of an American patriotic anthem (particularly drawing on Irving Berlin). The result is a politically charged and highly visceral joining of two lyric traditions.