Narrator
“For more than two years now, the Iranian state has tried to crush the dreams of freedom which arose in June in 2009. Dreams, such as those which others in the Middle East have seen come true this year.”
Pahvan Fahimi – spokeswoman for grieving mothers
“He was a child of 19, preparing to go to university. He hadn’t fulfilled any of his dreams. Who killed him? On whose orders? Why? I ask all of you. What was he asking of this country? Only peace and freedom of thought.”
Narrator
“Bahar is a student and a rapper. Like most young people, in 2009, she dreams of a different Iran.”
Bahar – student and rapper
“Like an enchanted castle crumbling it took just 6 or 7 hours to erase hope. And all those who voted for Moussavi realized it was just a dream.
The Islamic Republic has always been a nightmare for me.
…they’ve done all they can to try to take that hope from us... It will go on and on, until you scream your deepest feelings, you see freedom, and you’re no longer afraid to speak your mind. And that’s the day your hope will become reality.”
From “Letters from Iran” an Al-Jazeera Documentary
___________
This week, from March 20-23, it is Persian New Year, or Nowruz.
New Years
Happy New Years!
Persian, Hebrew, Roman, Chinese
Many in One.
Happy New Years!
Persian, Hebrew, Roman, Chinese
Many in One.
May the New Year live up to its Name.
_________
I am outside of the concrete square homes that the Maya people of Xmaben, Campeche in Mexico construct as a symbol of prestige beside their grass huts, however they don’t live in them. They used to hang my hammock from wall to wall, but before sleep each night, I was visited by a local girl. A small, petite young lady with unmistakably Maya features, she used to send me sweet smiles and laughter from outside, beckoning me to join her in the night. I wanted to marry her. I gave her a jade ring and consummated our innocent feelings. In my dream, I feel as if we are married. After I leave the village, I find myself in a furnished bedroom in a Mexican city. In it, I await my other love, a Spanish woman, a few years older than I, with a gorgeous wit. It seems we have married as well. Our life, however, becomes overly domestic and soon I wait for her, to find only our empty abode.
As the dream cycle continues, I attend a high school reunion. I am excited and confident to see my old friends from the days of superficial cliques and institutionalized learning. I tell people I married twice in Mexico. They don’t find this surprising from me, and go on to talk in their circles of indiscernible chatter. I later return home to my mother’s house in this same town. My stepfather and her watch television as usual. The television portrays ghastly scenes of war. Children, it seems of Southeast Asia, are being run over mercilessly by tanks, their bodies scarred with burn marks and ash. I react, abhorred and deeply offended by the mindless atrocities that we are witnessing via television, and my mother cries, but my stepfather watches without emotion. I leave.
_________
I pass my days
Contemplating the dead students of Tiananmen
And the Green Wave
Childless mothers silenced
Full of blood
A body
Language of resistance
Firm as the vicious fluid of life
Soft as the flesh
Emaciated with the steel of tank tracks
Or torn open in a single kill shot
Or E. Mehtari
Whose stern face became lip-bitingly serious
Upon mentioning the “trouza”
In English, rape
How he holds back tears
A fight against self-pity
The death of the ego
Asking, “where is God if not in you”
Yet, when asking you fall headlong
Into your deathless presence
Where you cease to be this body of crime
Ponder yourself
As the total equation of here
In the moment
At one
With the ground of all being
We humans
Why do some attain self-realization?
Only upon being split in half?
Sundered in shreds by our fellow man?
When did this arcane spiritual responsibility bestow devils of such wonderful emergence?
The Ahriman is certainly turning in its cemetery
Sheathed in female coverings and riot police uniforms
In these pain-ridden lands
Whose story immediately translates into our one story?
Throughout human history
In reclaiming that story
Allowing the truth to resurface naturally
As a feather, thrown with a handful of stones
Over an open lake
Thick with the opacity of crude oil
Hardening urges of those who sleep,
Still, sitting
Upright I petition the burning skin of my Love
To recede into her inmost self-forgiving
Be healed
With the same immediacy that one may feel oncoming death
Approaching with futile procession
Toward the white of their eyes
With equal subtlety
Plunging their ethereal hand
In the porous open of their now entered body
A mere passage
For the voice of all truths
For the Peaceful Youth Protestors Around the World
That's a powerful poem, like a frantic dialog between the spirit that knows all the wisdom and the heart that grieves about the stricken state of the world, especially the middle east, especially Persia the old home. The spirit pulls the unwilling human away from the mirrors of the internal conflict but only when we finally look at it, and see ourselves, our own fear of separation, annihilation creating all the pain -- for others seemingly separated, annihilated. Always something deeper to see, as always what we see is what we need to see, nothing else. We are large enough that the entire world playing out its harp is just for us, for our own evolvement.
ReplyDeleteI like the dreamers network, I'll be sure to check that out.