The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles

The Poem

36 The Poem Mohsen Emadi For Reza A’lameh-zadeh 1. Words are the burying ground of things. The trot of a horse through these lines is a sound I haven’t heard since childhood. Your laughter wilted in my teenage years. I write as if on pilgrimage to the city of the dead. If time by chance slips backwards, my father’s murmurs will echo in the ears of the text, the sound of a bullet will disturb the sleep of these lines and a wild-haired poem will pace a room that’s been decayed for years. Words have been arranged along the faded lines of a house: Here is a window, behind the window a courtyard. No one knows which nightmare awakens the poem. It sees sometimes, at the window, the glance of a neighbor’s bride, sometimes the swing and the bicycle, or the wall with its cheap paintings. It looks at them until they come alive then, to the inhale and exhale of living things goes back to sleep. 2. Years ago my father’s murmurs lost their way in the text of sleep and the poem lit three thousand candles, 37 built three thousand paper boats and offered them all to the sea. Now that I have packed my bags and wait for the first train that would not return me here, the poem is riding a bicycle; trembling and in haste it pedals through bumps and puddles, rings a door bell, stares at whispers and sobs afraid of being heard. But the whispers are so loud in the ear it is impossible to hear the whistle of a train. I am still in the station and the poem in Khavaran* protects the dead of these past years from the gaze of the guards. 3. A year ago the poem slipped through barbed wire where soldiers patrolled the hills of your breasts, stole your lips, your hands; recreated you piece by piece. This year, soldiers guard the edge of nothing: your body long stolen. In the station, my bench is occupied by a dead whose name the poem doesn’t know. *Located in the southeast of Tehran, Khavaran was a Baha’i cemetery later used for prisoners of conscience killed in the mass execution of 1988. It was reportedly demolished by the government in January 2009. 38 (It wouldn’t learn your name either.) Bullets and warm blood find their way into the lines— no paper can stop the bleeding. The station is full of passengers who are dead. The firing squads, and the hanging ropes are not waiting for any train. Mumbling grave-diggers ring the doorbells of three thousand homes. Three thousand abandoned bicycles litter the alleys. 4. The poem is not standing in front of a firing squad. Nor does the firing squad know where, on the poem, to aim at. They simply hike the price of utilities, the rent, and burial expenses. I cannot buy cigarettes for three thousand dead but I can bring them all back to life. I don’t want to make the poem send them back to a cemetery that doesn’t exist anymore; I only want to remind it that all the abandoned bicycles have decayed by now, that no one will ever again hear the jangle of their bells. The dead will remain in the station and if the poem can secure a ticket from each reader it will send them off on the first one-way train. In my country 39 three thousand dead in a station is normal. Three thousand dead on a train is normal. 5. At the border stations they arrest our tongues. Our words decay when they cross that line. I let go of your hands outside the station, the train’s whistle hurries my words. Words have filled up all the cabins, they dream thousand-year nightmares. My words are young, just thirty years old, but they have piled up layer by layer under this prison garb. Yellow was not the color of my first school shoes, nor was red the color of my piggy-bank, or blue the color of my first bicycle. Words grew up with the colors of your dress; they were a herd of fleeing horses, a rainbow that you would take off and send curving through the air, falling into mud and dirt, into handcuffs, darkness, and the command to shoot. 6. I’m not standing in this long line for bread and...