The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles

Red-Raft Woman

70 Red-Raft Woman Esther Kamkar In another country at the edge of the river I talk to the red-raft woman: Ask me and I’ll tell you about my sister. How we grew old without each other’s stories, how our children never slept like seals side by side on Grandma’s living room floor; her children never asked me for midnight pancakes. Red-raft woman make me a map and I’ll show you where I was years ago — Buffalo, Niagara Falls. No one ever told me about the sound — how it vibrates and embraces you. The joy of holding my sister after twenty eight years, the silence after the Falls. What roared in me was the grief-sound of absence. O, and her granddaughters, the mountain slope and wild poppies behind her house, and her garden blooming with tea rose from Kashan. ...