Vijay Seshadri:One more pride of India

                                Vijay Seshadri

Vijay Seshadri was born in Bangalore, India, in 1954 and came to America at the age of five. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where his father taught chemistry at Ohio State University. His poetry collections include 3 Sections (Graywolf Press, 2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2004), which won the James Laughlin Award; and Wild Kingdom (1996).

His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in A Public Space, AGNI, The American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard, Epiphany, Fence, Field, Lumina, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Ploughshares, Poetry, The San Diego Reader, Shenandoah, The Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, the Times Book Review, TriQuarterly, Verse, Western Humanities Review, The Yale Review, and in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times and The Best American Poetry 1997, 2003, 2006, and 2013.

Seshadri has received grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts and has been awarded The Paris Review’s Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize and the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement. He holds an AB degree from Oberlin College and an MFA from Columbia University. He currently teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where he has held the Michele Tolela Myers Chair. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son. 

The 98th annual Pulitzer Prizes in Journalism, Letters, Drama and Music were announced on Monday by Columbia University. Seshadri's '3 Sections' is a "compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless," the announcement said.

The prize for the poetry category was given for a "distinguished volume of original verse" by an American author. A Columbia University alum, Seshadri would receive USD 10,000 reward. Here are some profound lines from his award-winning collection of poetry.

Some of his poems

VISITING PARIS

They were in the scullery talking.

The meadow had to be sold to pay their riotous expenses;

then the woods by the river,

with its tangled banks and snags elbowing out of the water,

had to go; and then the summer house where they talked—

all that was left of an estate once so big

a man riding fast on a fast horse

couldn’t cross it in a day. Genevieve. Hortense. Mémé.

The family’s last born, whose pale name is inscribed on the rolls

of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. As in the fresco of the Virgin,

where the copper in the pigment oxidizes to trace a thin green cicatrix

along a seam of Her red tunic,

a suspicion of one another furrowed their

consanguine, averted faces.

Why go anywhere at all when it rains like this,

when the trees are sloppy and hooded

and the foot sinks to the ankle in the muddy lane?

I didn’t stay for the end of the conversation.

I was wanted in Paris. Paris, astounded by my splendor

and charmed by my excitable manner,

waited to open its arms to me.

Bright Copper Kettles

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,

speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,

their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s,

mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—

this is one of my favorite things.

I like it so much I sleep all the time.

Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed

deep in the dreams where they appear.

In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,

before the empress with the melting face, under

the towering plane tree, they just show up.

“It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.”

They are diffident and polite.

(Who knew the dead were so polite?)

They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes.

They don’t want to steal my body

and possess the earth and wreak vengeance.

They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides,

why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it.

One of them shyly offers me a pencil.

The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster.

Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music,

the right Reverend Al Green is singing,

“I could never see tomorrow.

I was never told about the sorrow.”

Sequence

1. HELL

You’d have to be as crazy as Dante to get those down,

the infernal hatreds.

Shoot them. Shoot them where they live

and then skip town.

Or stay and re-engineer

the decrepit social contraption

to distill the 200-proof

elixir of fear

and torture the...the what

from the what? And didn’t I promise,

under threat of self-intubation,

not to envision this

corridor, coal-tar black,

that narrows down and in

to a shattering claustrophobia attack

before opening out

to the lake of frozen shit

where the gruesome figure is discerned?

Turn around, go home.

Just to look at it is to become it.

2. PURGATORY, THE FILM

He was chronically out of work, why we don’t know.

She was the second born of a set

of estranged identical twins. They met,

hooked up, and moved in with her mother,

who managed a motel on Skyline Drive.

But always it was the other,

the firstborn, the bad twin, the runaway,

he imagined in the shadow

of the “Vacancy” sign

or watching through the window

below the dripping eaves

while they made love or slept.

The body is relaxed and at rest,

the mind is relaxed in its nest,

so the self that is and is not

itself rises and leaves

to peek over the horizon, where it sees

all its psychokinetic possibilities

resolving into shapely fictions.

She was brave, nurturing, kind.

She was evil. She was out of her mind.

She was a junkie trading sex for a fix,

a chief executive, an aviatrix.

She was an angel

to the blinded and the lamed,

the less-than-upright, the infra dig.

And she was even a failure.

She went to L.A. to make it big

and crept back home injured and ashamed.

3. PURGATORY, THE SEQUEL

They put him in jail, why we don’t know.

They stamped him “Postponed.”

But he didn’t mind.

The screws were almost kind.

He had leisure to get his muscles toned,

mental space to regret his crimes,

and when he wasn’t fabricating license plates

he was free

to remember the beauty

that not once but a thousand times

escaped him forever, and escapes me, too:

ghosts of a mist drifting

across the face of the stars,

Jupiter triangulating

with the crescent moon and Mars,

prismatic fracturings in a drop of dew...

4. HEAVEN

There’s drought on the mountain.

Wildfires scour the hills.

So the mammal crawls down the desiccated rills

searching for the fountain,

which it finds, believe it or not,

or sort of finds. A thin silver sliver

rises from an underground river

and makes a few of the hot

rocks steam and the pebbles hiss.

Soon the mammal will drink,

but it has first

to stop and think

its reflexive, impeccable thought:

that thinking comes down to this—

mystery, longing, thirst.

Kwame Dawes:spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music

                                      Kwame Dawes

Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes moved to Jamaica in 1971 and spent most of his childhood and early adult life there. As well as poetry, he is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and plays; he also practices as an actor and musician. His poetry is profoundly influenced by his "spiritual, intellectual, and emotional engagement with reggae music", and he has collaborated with musicians and artists to create a dynamic series of performances based on his poetry. His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius book remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley.

Dawes studied and taught in New Brunswick, Canada on a Commonwealth Scholarship, and as a PhD student he was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Brunswickan. From 1992-2012 he taught at the University of South Carolina; he is currently Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and with Glenna Luschei editor-in-chief at the Prairie Schooner. Dawes is also a faculty member of Pacific University’s MFA Program. He is co-founder and programming director of the biennial Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica.

He is the author of seventeen collections of poetry. The most recent titles include Duppy Conqueror (Copper Canyon, 2013); Wheels (2011); Back of Mount Peace (2009); Hope's Hospice (2009); Impossible Flying (2007), and Gomer's Song (2007). Progeny of Air (1994) was the winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection. In 2001, Dawes was a winner of a Pushcart Prize for his long poem, 'Inheritance'. He is the editor of many anthologies, including Wheel and Come Again: An Anthology of Reggae Poems, and Red: Contemporary Black Poetry, and he is also the Associate Poetry Editor of Peepal Tree Books, where he edits their impressive Caribbean Poetry list. Dawes received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

In 2009, Dawes won an Emmy Award in the category of New Approaches to News and Documentary Programming - his project documented HIV/AIDS in Jamaica, interspersed with his poetry, photography by Andre Lambertson, and music by Kevin Simmonds. The website Livehopelove.com is the culmination of this project.

In these recordings made specially for the Poetry Archive, Dawes' command of a range of tones and styles of delivery is demonstrated - from the powerful social commentary of 'Yap', a brutal account of homophobic violence made all the more disconcerting from the voice's impersonal reportage, to the melodious, rhythmical lament of 'Trickster', where the explorations of language become a path, 'a way to tell how I would be met on the road.' 'Sketch' is a tender portrait of illness that draws on and then questions the power of words to heal and console, revealing the impermanence of a wish, however keenly felt, to 'clean a grey line where your brows were…these markings of what you have suffered'. 'Wheels', meanwhile, alertly and humorously catalogues the doubts of a 'gangly televangelist', and 'Rituals Before the Poem' gently satirises the reverence around poetry's typical subjects, striking a tone of playful instruction - paralleled in Dawes' 'Memos to poets' (viewable on his website): over 100 short pieces originally broadcast on Twitter, that include everything from acidic witticisms on writing, to memorable, aphoristic adages that challenge and appeal to the wisdom of poetry reader or writer.

               

Some of  his poems

A Good Woman Blues

O Lord, Berta, Berta, O Lord, gal oh-ah,

O Lord, Berta, Berta, O Lord, gal well.

Go ’head marry, don’t you wait on me oh-ah,

Go ’head marry, don’t you wait on me well.

Might not want you when I go free oh-ah,

Might not want you when I go free well.

When you are out on the road, hustling

shelter in some taking-woman’s hovel,

when you wonder how long you will be

a broke blues man with only some

twenty-year-old story of how you were

somebody, how you sat in the same

studio where big-ass Ma Rainey

used to sit and drink bourbon; of how

people knew you, knew your voice,

how it was to buy a suit, walk

the country street and hear your

voice on the radio, and it has been

so long these stories like your clothes

have gotten so thin they don’t keep

you warm no more; and when out

there, you walking to the crossroads,

where you meet all kinds of monsters

and ghouls, and where you learn

how to limp and use your big

stick to part the arms of women,

you have nothing to keep you going

on dark nights when everything

feel like crap, and you are fifty

years old and you are not dead

and you have nothing to show for it;

no child whoever called you daddy

cause you never stayed long enough

for them to smell your skin,

and for you to hear them say it;

and you know that going back,

you will spoil all the lies

those women told for you, about

their daddy who will walk

around with his big hands

and his only instrument; who can

make a woman take off

all her clothes on the spot

and leave her man just by

the weeping and lonesome

feelings he can make with the piano.

That sharp-faced, cool-eyed man,

their daddy, who took a schooner

to France where everybody knows

his name—if you go back

with your tired self, looking

for a nip of booze to keep you warm,

and some fried chicken

for old time’s sake, what good

will that do? So all you have

is this one truth: that Cleo

is your Penelope and until

they nailed that coffin,

she stayed the one good thing

you ever did; she was a good

woman and she loved you,

and sometimes that is all a man

needs to keep on walking,

sometimes it all a man’s got;

all that has kept him from

the chain gang to the juke joint,

along those lonely roads

cutting across America—

that Cleo is all he ever had,

and Lord knows, she waited,

but you can’t outwait God,

Lord, Berta, Berta, you can’t

outwait, the Lord.

 If You Know Her

If you know your woman, know her rhythms,

know her ways; if you paying attention

to her all these years, you will know

how she comes and goes, how she slips

away even though she is standing in

the same place, you will know that her

world is drifting softly from you, and she

may not mean it, because all it is

is she is scared to be everything, scared

to be finding herself in you every time,

scared that one day she will ask herself,

all forty-plenty years of her, where

she’s been; if you know your woman,

you will know that mostly she will

come back, but sometimes, when she

drifts like this, something can make her

slip; and then coming back is hard.

If you know your woman, you can

tell by the way she puts on heels,

and she does not sashay for you

because it is not about you—how

she will buy some leather boots

and not say a word about it,

and you only see it when she walks

in one night, and she says she’s had

them forever; you will see the way

she loses the weight and pretend

its nothing, but when she isn’t seeing you

looking, you can see how she faces the mirror

lifts her chest to catch a profile,

and how she casually looks at her

ass for signs of life. If you know

your woman, when you are gone, she

will find things to do, like walk

alone, go see a movie, find a park,

collect her secrets and you won’t know,

because she is looking for herself.

And she won’t tell you that she wants

to hear what idle men say when she

walks by them; because what you say

is not enough. If you know your

woman, you know when she’s going

away and you will feel the big

hole of your love, and you can’t

tell why she’s listening and humming

to tunes you did not know she heard

before, and she will laugh softly

at nothing at all. If you know your

woman, you will see how she comes

and goes, and all you can do is wait

and pray she will come back to you,

because you know that your sins

are enough for her to leave and not return.

Avoiding the Spirits

Berniece: I don’t play that piano cause I don’t want to wake them spirits.

They never be walking around in this house.

          —The Piano Lesson, August Wilson

When at sunset the congregation gathers

in the low light of St. Helena’s old gray

Baptist chapel; they guard their hearts

from the whisper of the low-bellied trees;

calling on the blood as they brush off

the dew on their coats by the burial ground.

When they sing, the sound has the flat

simplicity of prayer, a sound that brings

heat to your neck, tears to your eyes

because you can hear in the rugged

rafters, hewn from old-growth trees

at the water’s edge, the voices of all those

people who had nothing but lament

and Jesus to fill the gap of a stolen life.

The sisters can’t make a man cross

that threshold unless he has come

to lay someone to rest or to witness

a child’s blessing or a daughter’s

wedding, for a man can’t hear the flat

voices in the church and not feel

the droop of his shoulders

and the weight of his dangling

empty hands that have too often

hung helpless for prudence’s sake, for good

sense, making him not a man

but an empty shell, a creature

who laughs to stop the shame

of not being able to keep his family

together and safe. No, he will rather

sit in the dark cathedral of the juke

joint and let the blues of sardonic

regret and caustic distance

wash him, make him know that

he is alone on the road, and all

he’s got is his story. My people

long gave up on the ancestors

    when they learned that those

   stepping out of the woods

  are the crippled gods, the beaten

  gods, the blackened and burnt-out

   tongueless gods, the broken

   gods, the castrated gods, the shadow

  gods with questions, asking

  us if they will ever heal, asking

 for a balm from the living. Who wants

 to pour libation for the burdened

  spirits? Silence is our salvation,

 that and the reassurance of this earth,

 this clear air, this forgetting.

Conceição Lima,

Conceição Lima, 

Maria da Conceição de Deus Lima (Santana, December 8, 1961), also known as Conceição Lima, is a Santomean poet from the town of Santana in São Tomé, one of two islands in the small nation of São Tomé and Príncipe situated in the Gulf of Guinea, off the western coast of Africa. She studied journalism in Portugal and worked in radio, television and in the print press in her native country. In 1993, Conceição Lima founded the weekly independent publication O País Hoje (The Country Today) which she directed and wrote for during its circulation. She received a degree in Afro-Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from King's College in London. Lima resides in London where she works as a journalist and producer for theBBC Portuguese Language Services. Her poetry has been published in newspapers, magazines, and anthologies in several countries. O Útero da Casa was her first book of poetry and was published in 2004 in Lisbon by the Portuguese publishing house Caminho. Her second book (also poetry), A Dolorosa Raiz do Micondó, was released in 2006 by the same publisher.

Lima is a post colonial writer, one of the few poets who came of age after the independence of her country in 1975. She started writing poems as a teenager and, in 1979, at the age of nineteen, traveled to Angola where she participated in the Sixth Conference of Afro-Asian Writers. She recited some of her poems and was probably one of the youngest participants present. Conceição Lima considers this to be the first phase of her career as a poet. The second phase of her career started with the publication of her poems in newspapers, magazines and anthologies.

In 2009, Conceição Lima traveled to Póvoa de Varzim (Portugal) and visited the Colégio de Amorim where she shared with students stories of her childhood and memories of family members who influenced her the most. She remembered her father and confessed that he was the one who taught her the power of words. When she was a child, her dad would compose music for her mother when she was mad at him. As a child, Conceição soon realized that words have the power to bring peace because her mom would make amends with him. However, she also realized that words can hurt; after all, it was her father's words that had caused her mom to be upset in the first place. Lima also revealed that her father always knew she would be a poet because of her very vivid and creative imagination.

Her publications

·         O Útero da Casa (2004)

·         A Dolorosa Raiz do Micondó (2006)

Some of her poems

Cataclysm and Songs

Happy what's left of me after I'm gone
If only one of the songs sung
Lives beyond the person singing in me now.
Yet I would not save from the slaughter
A single one of the songs I sang and sing.

Instead from the entrails of oblivion
I would steal the laughter of children
And the age of the proverb.

And so to those who come
I would offer intact the enigma of light

Three Contemporary Truths

I believe in the invisible
I believe in the levitation of witches
I believe in vampires
Because they are

Travellers

They bore sunsets and roads
Thirst for the horizon called them

- Who do you belong to?
Who are your people?

That's how our grandmother held out
A mug of water to the traveller

Bulleh Shah

                                                              Bulleh Shah 

Bulleh Shah 

Bulleh Shah Qadiri Shatari, often referred to simply as Bulleh Shah (Punjabi: بلہے شاہ, ਬੁੱਲ੍ਹੇ ਸ਼ਾਹ, Hindi: बुल्ले शाह) whose real name was Abdullah Shah, was a Punjabi Sufi poet, a humanist and philosopher. Bulleh Shah is believed to have been born in 1680, in the small village of Uch, Bahawalpur, Punjab, now in Pakistan. 
When he was six months old, his parents relocated to Malakwal. There his father, Shah Muhammad Darwaish, was a preacher in the village mosque and a teacher. His father later got a job in Pandoke, about 50 miles southeast of Kasur. Bulleh Shah received his early schooling in Pandoke, and moved to Kasur for higher education. He also received education from Maulana Mohiyuddin. His spiritual teacher was the eminent Sufi saint, Shah Inayat Qadiri, from Arain tribe of Lahore Punjab. 
Little is known about Bulleh Shah's direct ancestors, except that they were migrants from Uzbekistan. However, Bulleh Shah's family was directly descended from the Prophet Muhammad. 
A large amount of what is known about Bulleh Shah comes through legends, and is subjective; to the point that there isn’t even agreement among historians concerning his precise date and place of birth. Some "facts" about his life have been pieced together from his own writings. Other "facts" seem to have been passed down through oral traditions. 
Bulleh Shah practiced the Sufi tradition of Punjabi poetry established by poets like Shah Hussain, Sultan Bahu, and Shah Sharaf. 
Bulleh Shah lived in the same period as the Sindhi Sufi poet, Shah Abdul Latif Bhatai. His lifespan also overlapped with the Punjabi poet Waris Sha, of Heer Ranjha fame, and the Sindhi Sufi poet Abdul Wahab, better known by his pen-name, Sachal Sarmast (“truth seeking leader of the intoxicated ones”). Amongst Urdu poets, Bulleh Shah lived 400 miles away from Mir Taqi Mir of Agra. 
The verse form Bulleh Shah primarily employed is called the Kafi, a style of Punjabi, Sindhi and Siraiki poetry used not only by the Sufis of Sindh and Punjab, but also by Sikh gurus. Bulleh Shah’s poetry and philosophy strongly criticizes Islamic religious orthodoxy of his day. 
Bulleh Shah's time was marked with communal strife between Muslims and Sikhs. But in that age Baba Bulleh Shah was a beacon of hope and peace for the citizens of Punjab. While Bulleh Shah was in Pandoke, Muslims killed a young Sikh man who was riding through their village in retaliation for murder of some Muslims by Sikhs. Baba Bulleh Shah denounced the murder of an innocent Sikh and was censured by the mullas and muftis of Pandoke. Bulleh Shah maintained that violence was not the answer to violence. Bulleh Shah also hailed the ninth Sikh Guru, Guru Tegh Bahadur as a Ghazi, or "religious warrior", which caused controversy among Muslims of that time. 
Bulleh Shah’s writings represent him as a humanist, someone providing solutions to the sociological problems of the world around him as he lives through it, describing the turbulence his motherland of Punjab is passing through, while concurrently searching for God. His poetry highlights his mystical spiritual voyage through the four stages of Sufism: Shariat (Path), Tariqat (Observance), Haqiqat (Truth) and Marfat (Union). The simplicity with which Bulleh Shah has been able to address the complex fundamental issues of life and humanity is a large part of his appeal. Thus, many people have put his kafis to music, from humble street-singers to renowned Sufi singers like the Waddali Brothers, Abida Parveen and Pathanay Khan, from the synthesized techno qawwali remixes of UK-based Asian artists to the rock band Junoon. 
Bulleh Shah’s popularity stretches uniformly across Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, to the point that much of the written material about this philosopher is from Hindu and Sikh authors. 
In the 1990s Junoon, a rock band from Pakistan, rendered such poems as Aleph (Ilmon Bas Kareen O Yaar) and Bullah Ki Jaana. In 2004, Rabbi Shergill performed the unlikely feat of turning the abstruse metaphysical poem Bullah Ki Jaana into a Rock/Fusion song, which became hugely popular in India and Pakistan. The Wadali Bandhu, a Punjabi Sufi group from India, also released a version of Bullah Ki Jaana on their album Aa Mil Yaar...Call of the Beloved. Another version was performed by Lakhwinder Wadali titled Bullah. Bulleh Shah's verses have also been adapted and used in Bollywood film songs. Examples include the songs "Chaiyya Chaiyya" and "Thayya Thayya" in the 1998 film Dil Se. The 2007 Pakistani movie Khuda Kay Liye includes Bulleh Shah's poetry in the song "Bandeya Ho". The 2008 film, A Wednesday, included a song titled "Bulle Shah, O Yaar Mere". In 2009, Episode One of Pakistan's Coke Studio Season 2 featured a collaboration between Sain Zahoor and Noori, "Aik Alif". In June 2010 Coke Studio 3 Episode One featured "Na Raindee Hai" performed by Arieb Azhar. His tomb is located in Kasur, Pakistan
Some of his poems

At this one point,all talk ends.

Hold tight to this point, forget your calculations,
Leave the miserable state of unbelief,
Do not torment yourself with the fear of death and hell,
For these are imaginary fears.
Only into such a house will the truth enter.
At this one point, all talk ends.

For no reason you abrade your forehead on the ground,
You display reverence at the mehraab,
You recite the Kalma to entertain a listener.
But knowledge does not enter your heart.
Can the truth ever remain hidden?
At this one point, all talk ends.

Many return from Mecca as hajjis,
Blue shawls across their shoulders.
They profit from the merit earned by haj.
Who can admire such behavior?
Can the truth ever remain hidden?
At this one point, all talk ends.

Some withdraw to the forest,
Eat a single grain a day.
Bereft of understanding, they exhaust the body,
And return home in bad shape,
Their life sucked dry with useless fasting and prayer.
At this one point, all talk ends

Hold fast to your murshid
Become a devotee of all creation,
Intoxicated, carefree,
Without desire, indifferent to the world.
Let your heart be fully clean.
Bulla asks, can the truth then be stopped?

At this one point,all talk ends 

Azita Ghahreman:a poet from Iran

Azita Ghahreman

         

Azita Ghahreman is a poet from Iran who writes in Farsi.She was born in Mashhad in 1962. One of Iran's leading poets, she has lived in Sweden since 2006. She is a member of the South Sweden Writers' Union.

She has published five collections of poetry: Eve's Songs (1983), Sculptures of Autumn (1986), Forgetfulness is a Simple Ritual (1992), The Suburb of Crows (2008), (a collection reflecting on he exile in Sweden that was published in both Swedish and Farsi), and Under Hypnosis in Dr Caligari's Cabinet (2012).

Her poems directly address questions of female desire and challenge the accepted position of women.

A collection of Azita's work was published in Swedish in 2009 alongside the work of Sohrab Rahimi and Christine Carlson. She has also translated a collection of poems by the American poet and cartoonist, Shel Silverstein, into Farsi, The Place Where the Sidewalk Ends (2000). And she has edited three volumes of poems by poets from Khorasan, the eastern province of Iran that borders Afghanistan and which has a rich and distinctive history.

Azita's poems have been translated into German, Dutch, Arabic, Chinese, Swedish, French and English.

Azita Ghahreman was one of the poets who took part in the PTC's  Persian Poets' Tour. Her poetry is translated by Maura Dooley and Elhum Shakerifar.

Some of her poems

But

We stand back to back
to contemplate darkness
and the chirping of rain,
the rain eases
a new season dawns
we turn our heads
to contemplate Spring
but find we no longer know one another.

Glaucoma

The corn poppies came first,
then the locusts
and after that the unravelling wind.
That was how childhood looked to you
before the dark water, before the thorns,
before the mountain range of a thousand mosques
cast shadow over those wild flowers.

First the poppies went
then grandmother,
then the royal rooms grew shabby,
the photos of Oppenheimer, Lumumba,
the red furniture  - everything went to the second hand shop.

Joyous accordions and flags of mourning,
Turks and Kurds,
little blue patterned headscarves -
all passed us by in the street.
‘By Appointment to...' the Princes, my mother's brothers,
was stamped on every cup and shisha,
my mother, first in line for Friday prayer, kept her back to me,
my brother joined the Bassij.

First the locusts come, then the poppies
no
first the  poppies went
then the locusts...

The hollow of the eye    fills with snow,
the valleys of winter are white,
then come the thorns and the dark waters...

Happy Valentine

They say it was like the collision of seven mountains, six oceans and two   hemispheres. Well, they lied.

• Who told you I love you? I lament to the lilies, Actually, I hate you!
  I will fill your rivers with limes, flood your sheets with ink,
  I'll draw the devil on your pillow and scare the fish with the horns and tail
       I pin on you.
  I'll make my nipples irresistible and put padlocks on my blouse.
  I will cut down every tree on your street and delete your every file,
  I will call your name out backwards, I will steal your shirt,
  I'll smear tar on your windscreen, scatter nails at the bend in the road,
  I'll lock you in the loo and go see a film without a backward glance,
  I'll pop a cockroach in your drink and a drawing pin in your shoe,
  move all the pieces on the board and ruin every game,
  I'll put a desert between us, a whole teeming ocean.
  I'll cut your fancy tie into zig zags, I'll slip explosives into your nervous
        system. Each night I'll fill your ears with wailing banshees.
  I'll let myself change my mind at the drop of a hat but of your every
        move I'll keep a log.
  The very sound of you - Oh god! - it sets my teeth on edge - and, even
        worse,
  your gloopy eyes, like bowls of syrup, your stink of saffron and red roses,
  your heart full of goodluck goldfish, wriggling up against each other!
  You know what? If you want to ask me something, I'll tell you straight -
         but if you accuse me of anything, I'll just deny it!
  I'll pour a Molotov cocktail into your hair; so you'll look like that picture of
         Rimbaud,
  I'll stick my fingers into your dreams, to mess you up altogether,
  I'll take over your sleep; you'll think there are frogs needling you under
         those sheets.
  I'll turn the sweetest most tender images into ugly ones;
  instead of beautiful birds I'll draw horses in the treetops. You know those
         big fat women on Russian dolls? I'll graffiti them all over your table!I'll make you look like a squirrel crossed with a lion and anteater. 
  Yet I can't just dump you - a tatty, tormenting Tomcat
  that can't even find his own way home.
  Every arrow points to you. This accordion of streets folds back to you.
  But I'm dizzy trying to climb all these summits and towers, trying to learn by heart your long number; these ears and eyes of mine are worn out
        with it.
  I've banged on your walls so hard the plates are smashed to
        smithereens.
  You may be far away from my sharp barbs but deep inside me it's as if
        elephants sing, spinning hoops of fire and flowery-skirted bears 
        dance on barrels.
  Your mad jabbering parrots have even got me hooked on an idea of India.
  If only there was some way to tame this dragon, to put the tiger back in
        its cage. If only it could be Spring again,
  before this greedy animal eats up all the white lilies,
  before this monster completely destroys her entire world.
  
  Love is like a red rose that I tie to the stone of myself and aim at your
        window.
  Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle.
  Crash!
  

  Letter

  In the silence dreams came
  and brought to mind     your silhouette against the sky
  and you    changed  into a bird    carrying hurt bigger than your own
         shadow
  and this brought to mind       your cold, stained fingers,
  those cut and folded wings placed in an envelope
  and that brought to mind
  how well we fought
  to the bitter end.
  Silence
  in which you stand like a tree
  putting out green, unfolding leaves,
  bountiful; a lantern glimmering with blood-red fruit
   so much riper than
  the sharp words that cut us short, hollowed us out.
  In this emptiness
  your knife is still sharp
  it has gouged a pit in the passage of years
  full of darkness.
  Silence, in which we carried on,
  making us act out bad dreams,
  enfolding us in all those dark clouds,
  proffering no handy little mirror for you to look in
  and understand
  that rain is brighter than anything your clouds had to offer.
  

  Snow

  This sheet that stretches from here to the world's end
   is covered by all that fallen snow.
  Why must we be lost too?
  Just a single stray earring
  shows midst all this whiteness,
  not a tree, not a rabbit, not a star.
  Where are we amongst it all?
  
  When you chucked the earring in that drawer
  shook out the darkness on the balcony
  and threw the sheets into the laundry basket,
  at the end of that long night
  I died a little.
  
  It was a fresh, wild garden,
  but every path was covered
  with sheets of snow.
  It is falling now, shrouding everything still ..
  

  The Boat That Brought Me

  Behind these eyes that look like mine
  old names are fading away, the past lies crumpled in my clenched fist -
  a coppery bird in coppery wind,
  this vast place has covered me from head to toe.
  
  I am not stripped of word and thought
  but sometimes what I want to say gets lost
  like a moon smudged with cloud, or when I splutter on a drink.
  My tongue trips up when I speak of that journey
  though the blood in my veins felt the truth of death.
  As I traced my footsteps through the tracery of my old language
  Summer whispered to me
  and my frozen fingers began to put out shoots
  even as I began to love the cold ebb and flow of tides.
  
  Sometimes I miss
  the boat that brought me here,
  now that I am witness to the icy eyes of a Swedish winter,
  under these tired old clouds,
  while that suitcase still holds a patch of the sky-blue me.
  

  The First Rains of Spring

  It is better to bustle away,
  to be busy with some work or other
  and keep love at bay.
  For when it takes hold
  we find significance everywhere we look,
  the pelican's point of view seems persuasive,
  we long to learn the language of lizards,
  even an ant's dizzying ascent looks meaningful.
  And what have we gained from it?
  Only the last winds of autumn,
  the first rains of spring.
  

  When Winter Comes

  When winter comes
  I will look in the mirror and know myself again.
  On fire with ideas, my books were burning.
  My daughter came to me in dreams, a deer running,
  a deer that had me flee to the mountains.
  Well, I can hug those mountains,
  see how they nestle in my arms?
  
  There was nothing to be afraid of after all.
  The scale of these things is just a matter of perspective,
  and even when we fall, we rise up again,
  the sea looks calmer,
  the fluffy white dog is back on its lead.
   
  So don't berate me, 
  don't blame me,
  don't beat me up about it,
  don't make me weep blood. 
  Count the passing years on your fingers,
  they are galloping by like a wild, dark horse
  and the only thing at the end of that path is winter.
  
  When winter comes
  we can go in one of two directions,
  we can get lost
  or we can find ourselves again.
  I shouldn't have been frightened,
  I should have said, why torture yourself?
  
  So that those shadows melt away leaving just me in the mirror again.
  

  With a Red Flower

  Wearing a poppy
  leave behind those black clothes,
  the flags of mourning,
  the tired, disconsolate streets.
  This is the only way forward.
  Wearing your red flower
  climb from between these handwritten lines,
  turn from the empty space of this paper
  and step into my memories.
  
  Come! Meet me
  in that shabby old house,
  where now the pipes are rusty,
  the shutters lost in ivy and long grass,
  where cobwebs and whispers have
  settled over everything,
  where, after all these years,
  sorrow is the only dustsheet.
  
  Come back to me, hide your fears,
  wearing your red flower, come back,
  but take care that no one sees
  the route that brought you here from Heaven.