I was there.
an unborn child
playful among guns.
The sun rises
and I carry your death
womb by womb.
Pomegranates trees start shaking
in the nightmares of my mother.
One thousand moons fall from the branches.
A mirror breaks and in every broken piece
my mother gives birth.
In all the pieces,
I am crying and opening pomegranates with my thumbs.
What are you doing here? he asked
I didn’t know
I woke up
in a song he wasn’t singing.
The stars were in him,
lost lakes in me.
The moon was in him,
waxing and waning in me.
Lips were in him,
kissing in me.
Sparrows were sleeping on the vines of my veins,
what the bullets were saying startled them.
They kept hitting their heads on the edge of my body.
They flew away through my shadow.
In the rhythm of a shovel
entering and leaving the earth,
a cradle was rocking far away and
my mother was emptying it
of sand.
Different deaths
eluded me.
With every new change of clothing
I wore a new death.
Your death
stole me from all of them.
It wanted to be mine.
Silence by silence
it turned to pomegranates in my mouth and
silence by silence
it fell like rain in my mother’s lullaby and
silence by silence
I arrived where you are
word by word
poem by poem.
- to Abbas Meftahi (1945-1972, executed by a firing squad)