i see my sister
rolling on snow
to put the fire out.
i see the snow melt
at her touch
on her tongue.
she runs
to the snow-man
we made together.
i see her
burying her face
in his chest.
i see my father
petrol can
in his hand
looking at her
mouthing
she’d dishonoured him.
bring me the night
tell the snow
to stay in the sky
its lights
burn
my eyes.
She puts her ear to the dam
as if listening for Morse code
but she’s trying to hear
the sounds of the waves
hitting the thick walls.
She murmurs to them
willing them to hit harder.
She believes that
one day the raging water
will break the hard wall
of her cell.
We were wrong
to think that the earth
covers the dead.
So many corpses
never reach the earth
they’re washed over and over
with cold salt water
till there is nothing left of them
but bones.
Published on Live Encounters (Download PDF)
Time froze
at the call of the first name.
The names always began
being called at noon
when the air was dank
with hundreds of women
confined
breathing each other’s breath
longing for the darkness
for no one was ever called
for execution at night.
Whenever I board a train
I remember Yavar
he worked in a factory in Arak
making parts for trains.
He used to point with pride and say:
‘You see that train!
I made it.’
He heard the sound of trains
in his sleep
yet when he went anywhere
he went by coach
as he never earned enough money
to take a train to go somewhere,
anywhere.
He left some of himself
in all these million moving pieces.
Homelessness
Twilight, walking down Camden high street
past the bright open shops
and the full up pubs
I see him through a forest of legs
sitting by a lamp post
his hands on his young ears
in the midst of the high noise.
His back hunched
his legs drawn up
making space for the passers-by.
Men and women are all around him
talking and laughing
as if he is not there.
God
When she heard she had given birth to a boy
all the pain lifted from her body
God had listened to her prayers
and was sending her a copy of himself
hopefully he would look like her husband.
Featured on Live Encounters
Nasrin Parvaz became a civil rights activist when the Islamic regime took power in 1979. She was arrested in 1982, tortured and spent eight years in prison. In 1993, she fled to England. Her prison memoir is being crowdfunded by Unbound publisher. Nasrin’s stories, poems, articles and translations appeared in Exiled Writers Ink; Modern Poetry in Translation series; Write to be Counted, Resistance Anthology 2017; Words And Women 2017; 100 poems for human rights 2009; Hafiz, Goethe and the Gingko 2015; Over Land, Over Sea, Poems for those seeking refuge 2015; A novel, Temptation, based on the true stories of some male prisoners who survived the 1988 massacre of Iranian prisoners was published in Farsi in 2008.
Click on the Image to enlarge.
Two poems from Nasrin Parvaz on Live Encounters October issue
Have you ever seen
mulberries,
how their red juice
stains the earth where they fell?
Nothing is as painful as falling.
I’ve seen so many workers
fall from buildings
and become mulberries. Continue reading Mulberries
