घुड़सवार

I. Night in Tehran, Noon in Beijing

For the Persian children who never had time to grow up amid the war in Iran.

Tehran’s night—

a thread spun from black veils.

Beijing’s noon

tears open a sheet of glass-papered candy.

Someone lights red firecrackers

deep in an old alley,

and the dawn settles

on the frozen rim of a porcelain bowl.

The old wound of the Abadan refinery

is a page torn from the calendar.

Among the rubble, fragments of The Rose Garden

are silently recited by the western wind.

The same light—

touches the salt-white shores of the Caspian,

and kindles the frozen bronze vats of the Forbidden City.

While drones and missiles

cut across the crescent like hawks,

someone bends down

to gather scattered urns of ash.

Deep in an air-raid shelter

hand-copied poems sprout in clay jars,

while giant screens on Chang’an Avenue

count down toward the New Year fireworks—

zero,

then one, then two…

The winding routes of the Persian Gulf

suddenly tighten,

pressing into

voices that never finished their prayers.

May the shells you gather

grow into a dawn

no longitude or latitude can divide.

Every grain of sand remembers

how, in the falling arc of a sweet mulberry,

it once grew again

into amber.

A road of silk will cross the deserts

and bring millions of plum blossoms,

lifting the entire weight of spring.

II. Silence of Tehran

They say sweet olives grow

in a barren sea of sand,

their roots soaking

in the fissures of oil.

When the dust rises

they once stood like rows of torches.

Now they have shattered

into ten thousand suns

burning the innocent lamps of children.

Drones drop parentheses

into the scripture of the sky,

annotating its silence.

A veiled mother

sifts starlight from the flames,

searching only

for a name

not yet translated into dust.

The desert is rising like a tide.

Grain against grain—

sparks of sirens, borders,

and the delirious prophecies of politicians.

On the negotiation table

the last dates have dried

into scorching shells.

If years must be counted in blood and fire,

let every wound

become a river.

Let roots from the other shore

sprout along its bed

and grow into bridges of shelter,

where the innocent may gather

their shattered hearts.

When sandstorms lift the torn pages

of the scripture again,

there will always be unborn hands

beneath the scorched earth,

stubbornly assembling

a whole, unlit moon—

to recognize

the ruined galaxy under the rubble.

III. The Children of Tehran

Do not teach me my homeland

through satellite maps.

Tehran is the button

that fell from my mother’s coat.

It is the hole of light

my father burned in the oilcloth

during nights of blackout.

They measure the sky

with grey pencils.

The drone

is the blue that escaped the drawing.

I learned to finish my milk

before curfew,

fold my prayers into paper airplanes

and send them into the night.

Sirens grow like upside-down plane trees,

roots sinking into the radio,

bearing copper fruit.

I gather the dead shells

and string them with threads from my scarf

into a noisy broken wind chime.

In distant fairy tales

they polish the word “peace”

again and again,

like scrubbing the blood-stained bronze

in a museum.

But my schoolbag grows heavier—

half a loaf of crushed bread,

and a blue crayon

picked from the ruins,

the one that once

cut open every line.

Iron clouds roll along the horizon,

measuring us with the blanks they cast.

I erase, from my homework page,

a word problem

calculated with life.

I hide beneath the bed,

calculating the straight distance

from the floor

to heaven—

separated

by an entire childhood

converted into rubble.

Children of Tehran

do not wish upon shooting stars.

They lie in yesterday’s craters

and look up—

discovering that every wounded star

has grown

into the shape of a mother’s love.

And when the wind passes

the broken Azadi Tower,

sometimes it lets slip

one pale feather

of a homing pigeon

from 1976.

(Poems were written originally in Chinese by the author and then self-translated into English.)