AIAW Featured Poet: Solmaz Sharif

Solmaz Sharif - Poet

Solmaz Sharif - Three Poems



English  (a transliteration)

This is how I was taught English.

The capital opening a sentence: a mother duck

and ducklings trailing; the State, the Church. People

deserve their names capitalized, too.

Tall letters towering over the rest:

Major, Corporal, titles that do not belong

to doormen, assistants, waitresses.

My teacher would correct that sentence.

I was also supposed to stand up like that—

I; a slunk back me. head bent. Period to mark a complete

thought: subject and verb, clause vs phrase. Write out:

versus.

 

I found it difficult, between these commas

and semi-colons, between underlining the article

and circling the participle to squeeze in the language

over my dinner table, my conversations over tea

and shirini. I discovered, life doesn't—write out:

does not—end with a period; moments fall

down into the next

the tank tracks of a road stay

rugged 10years after the war

(capitalize: The War; Iran-Iraq. both tall.)

the cab still bumps over the tracks

like braille messages from the martyrs

my mother's childhood house still

pockmarked with semi-

automatic slugs you can't remove one

history from the next

one person from in it

 

This is how I was taught English.

What is exact. Precise.

What tongue considered finessed. What voice

quoted in the paper;

to dot your page so they know you know

what you are doing.

In between this confetti you can write all kinds of things like

enemy combatant (lower case—just

a class of entities). Make sure to capitalize

Axis of Evil, it, certainly, denotes a well-defined location.

 

This is how I was taught English. Passive:

taught. The do-er hidden behind

Guns fired, 25 killed in blast, Indonesian woman allegedly

held as a slave how to hide a crime

like shellmounds

how to chop down

a murder

into agreeing clauses

snipers in each sentence of the new york times

my words always followed with

,” she said.

She claimed, "

 

but now this is how

i teach myself english

catch the words above my dinner table

and not shame

to fall one moment into the next

each letter squatting close

to the dirt the story

 

give me the word

the meat

naked

a window sparking through a brick faced building

not curtained behind a proper tongue

no desire to tower

but to root to spread

to telephone it's way

calling all our names

ghazal on you leaving

you say you leave saturday but it may as well be right now

around my home the smoke of you grows so light now

 

you never stay long enough to fall in love with me

my cigarette and movie offers to you such a pathetic sight now

 

she takes you back into her bed after all your cancer lies

my “i love you” limps after hers – not much of a fight now

 

don’t know what about your magic mouth

still makes my heart a summer child’s kite now

 

your fingers don’t write me poems or call my phone

across a dinner table nowhere near my flesh they still excite now

 

you dodge you ditch you always two taillights blinking bye

but still i wash my sheets and groom my lips like you might now

 

this song is old: you sit so brief on Sol’s ground

i realize i have always been in love with your flight now

ameh explains her pill collection

in your Shiraz apartment

you cut pictures of lovebirds out magazines

tape them to your walls

to accompany your lone parrot

cawing away in the stairwell

as you tell me you can’t explain

finding yourself in the middle

of an intersection

til a stranger leads you away

from the line of traffic

ameh sometimes you sleepwalk

through your days

 

and each morning you wake alone

to a bloodied pillow

hacking something awful out

from deep deep within you

the doctors can’t tell you where

the blood comes from

 

you say khaylee zajr keshidam

and you have

suffered a lot

 

wartime with one son locked

in an Ahwaz prison cell

underground no windows

no light or caught breezes

he just hears air raid whistles through summer heat

with nowhere to run to

baking in the concrete pen

like sangak bread stuck to the ribs of a tanoor

your other son maneuvering

somewhere over corpses and wire

plopped on the frontline

 

you say

when the war started

you wailed

and wailed

and one friday

after you bused miles to your son in prison

the guards denied your visit

again

and this time

ameh you hit

and hit

your own head

against the prison wall

 

you say you’ve had the same

headache since


Solmaz Sharif