AIAW Featured Poet: ZARA HOUSHMAND

Zara Houshmand - Poet -- Photo by Rino Pizzi

Identifying Photos of Basijis

When the eyes of the living hold no more light than the dead
and ignorance makes sport of human dignity,

when the marksman lifts his weapon’s scope to hollow eye
and surrenders his soul to smoke and mirrors,

when a human body falters at the border, barbed,
between fragile meaning and momentary meat,

when tender sons at one stroke become men and no longer men,
then Sohrab dies again, and yet again for each new age.

There is no Rostam left to carry his weight from the field,
not one killer standing among you worthy to feel this shame.

It was the beginning of spring: a new year
laid a finger on the balance of night and day.
Tiny green tassels ruffled the black fields,
the thirsty earth drank snowmelt, and wild
hyacinths, like headstrong brides,
experimented with perfume.

The stutter of guns. Silence. The guns again,
seconded after a heartbeat off the cliff face.

We drummed debate till the lamps died, nightly:
Idols or empty stone, round and round,
history and the eye of the beholder.
Guldar’s eye is blind to all but Roya’s beauty:
Guldar the half-wit, Roya the harelip,
beauty hovers between them.
History’s a harlot, faithless, prone
to unprovoked fury: crockery flies,
the ceiling falls, the story lies broken.
Back to the plough you go, hungry.
History, would you stone her?

Their gaze is wide as sky and furrow-straight as time.

Philosophers at night, farmers in the morning,
foot in front of foot. Time is braided,
time is spinning, time is frayed. Between lying
and waking, seed and harvest,
what catastrophe lies curled?
Into the plough you lean, fated.

The inarticulate stutter of guns. Then silence.

Stone holds stories without anger,
silent against history’s rage.
Heart speaks to patient stone,
to the river egg in a rag nest
that serves as a sad bride’s friend.
Stone hears, stores up sadness,
gathers pain until it holds no more;
finally
it shatters.
An old wives’ tale but true.

Their lips betray no sadness, no anger. They listen.

There is science in the patient stone,
the whelm of wave upon wave.
As when pain is neighbor to pain,
face echoes face, heart
looks haggard in the mirror.
As when history stamps her feet and flings her skirt,
the cliffs tremble, the mountains throw dust on their heads.

The rude guns. The tongue-tied, stuttering guns
chip away at fingers, one by one.
Dust blossoms at mortar blows, at the tank
craning its neck up the cliff face.
Did they think this enemy was flesh?
Mortars against mountains.

Each day, the sun’s shadow wiped their brows again.
Our nights passed in silence then.

Agha Mohandes orders dynamite and drills,
determines fracture points. I, bande, humbly
turned slave, or worse: a slave has value,
a spider at gunpoint, riding old rope.
Like a crawling thing. Clinging,
afraid of the upside down sky,
the waiting earth.

Finally
the unbinding of stone;
liberation of dust.
The sky reels, churning, and the dust turns
like mud on a potter’s wheel.

Dust settled like summer on eyelids, wintered our lashes.
It was the beginning of spring.

Foreigners gather the pieces now, sorting rubble,
numbering clods. The children mock,
throw pebble gifts and fists of dust:
Sir! Is this what you were looking for?

Silence sweeps the valley, unbound.
When the wind calms, you can hear them listening still.
The finest of powders coats the windowsill,
sifts like ash on the bread,
catches light suspended
at the end of a breath.

The Plumber’s Poem

That’s my hair that’s wrapped around your snake, Ben Yakov.
It’s filthy, but it’s mine.
Seventy-nine dollars and fifty cents.
A plumber earns more than a writer does,
and we both laugh.
I don’t mind, write the check.

My name? Iran,
I mumble.
Your accent undresses Israel.
Our eyes meet, apologize,
just you and I
for history
for all the politicians’ lies
and for the real things too.
The unspeakable things.

Are you happy? I ask,
but really I’m asking
What do you miss?
(Green almonds and the smell of kerosene;
the language of my dreams.)
But you say Yes, and anyway,
where else could I go?

All these fond objects glow with leaving, casting light
Like history. This is why monks become homeless;
This is how you carried me over the threshold,

How you led me into the forest, like a wind
Sweeping the ground before my feet, exchanging vows
With every noble tree we pass. Our path is mapped

In the green light sifting through leaf-veins, the trenches
that run through crazed bark. It skirts many villages,
laughing at sad lovers and old journeymen, trapped.

When life passes before your eyes on death’s threshold,
Don’t think it rewinds, runs fast forward, or pauses
Any way other than this: breath by breath by breath.

Eighty-odd years of wandering
Armenia, Syria, Lebanon, Iran,
the caravan has dumped them now
a few blocks beyond Burnet.

Baba rakes leaves on the front lawn
while Mama stomps the growing pile,
in up to her knees, the pain for a moment
forgotten, as they laugh like young lovers
in an old land, with all the future
of the wine still to come.

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