I just got back from my evening classes (I am back to school... had some time off since Maman passed away...) anyway I wrote this poem earlier today and sent it for Akhbare rooz. Here is the link...to The Last Supper.

I tell my brother (the eldest of the two) I am sad. I miss Maman's presence in my life... he says: az miyaan rafte mothar vali az bayn narafte (she is not among us any more but she has not gone from within.) she is closer then a breath of fresh air.

Mystic Silence

From each, Love demands a mystic silence.
What do all seek so earnestly? Tis Love.
Love is the subject of their inmost thoughts,
In Love no longer 'Thou' and 'I' exist,
For self has passed away in the Beloved.
Now will I draw aside the veil from Love,
And in the temple of mine inmost soul
Behold the Friend, Incomparable Love.
He who would know the secret of both worlds
Will find that the secret of them both is Love.

Farīd ud-Dīn Attar Abū Hamīd bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm

Heritage


Eden,
Fire,
water for the rice,
human...
boil in the pot

Before the execution
the memory of his mother
may be the last imprisoned wish

After the dinner
-at the prisons back yards-
the butchered bones,
make the garbage piles
on the slimy floors.

Sheema Kalbasi

Years of living away from my birth country makes me struggle with constant fear of loss but it is nothing compared to what others may experience living under a totalitarian regime. Sometimes I can't even grieve over my mother's death when I think of people who are hanged at the age of 16, executed for their religious and political beliefs or are under house arrest. I sit to write but the words come short. I need a language that can echo the ache, the pain, the hate, the misery, the loss, the need, the passion, the love, the lust, the hope, the desire and the dream.

I just read Negar's Aug. 4th post! I can't stop laughing. This is true. We probably are cousins... (our great grandfather's -when living- may have been brothers).

I wanted to link to her but never knew her name and now I KNOW.

...is it mother's day in Iran? Wasn't it in Dec? Anyway I don't have her to send flowers... she, keeping them even dry.

Right this minute I ask myself, Sheema how far do you need to drown in your grief before you know your hair is floating around your face. Your eyes, ears and mouth open to the cleansing water hoping for your heart to accept the absence, mother's death. Now did you hit the bottom Sheema to start over? To push your feet, pulling your body to the top, hands swimming towards the light, your hair traveling back and forth as you move to the surface? And the mermaids clapping for you to succeed? No! I haven't hit the bottom yet. I sit here with fingers that up until a few minutes ago were rounding ground meat for supper, placing the golden-party-crown on top of the little girl's head, helping P to find something for the garden, awaiting the gusts to arrive tonight. No I haven't hit the bottom yet.
I am black and blue with mother's memory but fake a smile as if her body is still living fresh. I wish mother... it was me pushing my luggage through the gates and you, my beloved woman...were floating outside the airport window... with your eyes looking at me... awaiting me to arrive...

Right this minute I want to be in that graveyard in Copenhagen, lay on top of your grave, lay as if forever, mother.

Congratulations to Shahrzad Sepanlou and her husband Dr.Amir Fassihi. They are the proud parents of a baby girl.

The rape of the innocent

Within these words
none can reach out
to take the clock back
or the knife that bruises.

Nothing means Nothing
Tremble, Shake, Exile
Execution, Stoning
Killed, Dead, Shut.

Sheema Kalbasi

This too will pass.

In a few days one of my best friends will be visiting from Denmark. We will be traveling to-in Canada for 8-10 days.

Life sadly enough is been divided to chapters of before and after. "Before" Dec.2003 when Maman was a living soul and "after"... which continuously hunts me.

a few links to a few of my resent works...

Na! and Larry Jaffe, translation from English.

Roger Humes, my dear friend... I like to publicly thank you for your continues support.

When I am all tide up in my own thoughts... knowing you are only a breath away from me... is the breeze of cool air on my face.

Yesterday... I finally rearranged some of Maman's cloths, books, notes, poems and letters she had written to me over the years... we lived apart. The emotional exhaustion was beyond words. I could have left them packed in the suitcases forever but for how long? While cleaning I sat down time after time with her Sufi songs and prayer books, makeup box, her notes in my hands... bending... my head almost touching the carpet... my face in her cloths...
Sometimes it is too hard knowing she has died... sometimes all I can do is to put my head on my hands and let the tears fall unseen... unheard...

Later I took a shower to feel the running water touch my naked body, warming it when nothing and none can fill the cold emptiness.

Today I am sad.

at times... I love you so bad that I can't hear my thoughts.

I am traveling again

I am traveling again
I need to find my documents,
Those that do not present my black hair
And black eyes but
A tall and blond girl.

This time I have to make up my mind
Which passport should I take?
The blue? The brown or the green?
I have to take the right one, a passport
That can take me anywhere without the humiliation
Of my colored face
- Ironically I am a Caucasian
- who knew a Caucasian is a colored girl!


When I was born an Iranian
My identity got lost
At the emigration line
Where I stood nameless
For three years without a mother to nurture the teenage girl
and a shaky refugee status that kept me from
remembering what my home looked like when I left
my room and the paintings my father had painted
and the books I had inherited from his childhood.
- when I left, father never sat by my bed and never told the stories of the Persian kings again.
- and mother closed the door to my room and never dusted it as if I never once lived in that Iranian home.



I am traveling again
Soon I have to paint my eyebrows blond
to replace these that I borrowed
from a grand mother who long ago
died in a taxi on her way to visit her son, my father in exile.


I have to find the right face
to go with the passport this time around
Back in December 2003,
they asked me at the airport gates
why my Danish identity doesn't look right?
I had to tell them my mother has just died
And my identity was lost on the hospital bed
Where she pushed me for hours,
thirty years ago, without knowing
she was dieing on a hospital bed
faraway from her homeland.


Ah! Sheema!

Sheema Kalbasi

"...Take away my lollypop, little incident
Raise me on the lap of your fascism
so in you I can reach the right to choose.
Rights are meaningless unless you don't have them
and are facing those who do.
I will not burn you because my roots will turn into ashes
I command you, fascist incident!
Let there be the monster, single-headed and double-eared, upon the earth..."

Maryam Hooleh's revolutionary poem Inferno, Inc. in many ways is the tale of the Iranian people's struggle. Her honesty and strength in poetry is beyond gender definition. You can read the Inferno, Inc. on the Iranian Times.

P: it's so delicious to watch movies with you, Sheema.
Sheema: how come?
P: cause you get so excited and start jumping (and running back and forth) and I can't fall asleep. Very expressive.
Sheema: the other day dad said...he still can't watch movies with me.