An Illinois-based law professor has compiled a collection of poems written by prisoners in Guantanamo Bay to be published this summer.

Prisoners initially scratched some of the poems on foam coffee cups and passed them to one another, said Marc Falkoff, an assistant law professor at Northern Illinois University who collected the poems.

Cover art for Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, a collection of poetry by inmates of the U.S. naval base and prison.
(University of Iowa Press/Associated Press)

Then the guards discovered what was going on, they smashed the containers and threw them away, fearing that it was a way of passing coded messages.

But some of the prisoners had memorized their own work and had written it down later, either after being released or after being granted access to paper.

Falkoff, who has represented 17 Yemeni prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, collected the works from his clients and through other lawyers who have clients at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

An 84-page anthology entitled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, is to be published in August by the University of Iowa Press.

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky has written a few words for the cover of the book, saying the prisoners' voices deserved attention, although not necessarily admiration.

'On the wings of thought'

Their voices are sometimes angry and tormented, sometimes resigned and spiritual.

Afghan prisoner Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost, who has since been released, told his lawyer that writing poetry kept him from losing his sanity.

One poem reads: "Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body, so I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life. Those who have no courage or honour consider themselves free, but they are slaves. I am flying on the wings of thought, and so, even in this cage, I know a greater freedom."

Another poem reflects the fading hope of a man who has spent years behind bars.

"When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees, hot tears covered my face. When the lark chirped, my thoughts composed a message for my son. Mohammad, I am afflicted. In my despair, I have no one but Allah for comfort," the poet writes.

Falkoff said the poems have been translated from Arabic to English by a limited pool of translators granted security clearances by the U.S. military and some of the poetic cadence may have been lost in the process.

The poems were cleared by U.S. military censors, who screen any material sent out of the Guantanamo Bay prison. Many poems did not make it through the Pentagon's security screening.

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, described the detainees' poems as "another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies against whom they are at war."

Some critics of U.S. policy have called for the Guantanamo Bay prison to be shut because the indefinite detention of prisoners there infringes their human rights.

About 375 people, some supporters of al-Qaeda and others rounded up during the chaos of the war in Afghanistan, are still in detention.

Dost, who was a poet and journalist before his arrest, said some prisoners have gone mad inside Guantanamo and some have committed suicide.

Profits from the sale of the book will go to the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has spearheaded litigation on behalf of Guantanamo detainees.