Search my bag.
What use is it anyway?
Deep in my pocket hides a sigh all too familiar with:
Halt!
Leave me alone!
As a matter of fact, I’ll sleep with the raspberry bush and won’t be faced down!
Why do you always target a woman
who abandons her walls,
pins a heart to her shirt.
There’s nothing in my suitcase
except innocent hair.
Leave me alone!
I dreamed I’ve stolen this heart from God, that I won’t reach tomorrow.
I dreamed the place to which I’m going
my shoes would stick to Friday.
What if all of God’s land has Leukemia?
I’ll tell my fortune with a dandelion, release its pedals to the moon:
come back Fridays of my childhood,
come back to me with that same boy
whose hands sprouted kites
and I, with all the ten fingers with which I could count,
fell for him.
Why do you always target a women
who has pinned a heart to her shirt?
Here the flights are always delayed.
In the bows and arrows of war’s streets,
or in the muddied bellies of slack clothes-lines,
The bats will eventually grow old.
At least give back my childhood photo.
Lonelier than an abandoned kite in the closet,
I am finally stamped, and I miss home.
The antenna shoots for the sky but
my dress on the clothes-line embraces God.
Translated from Persian by Sholeh Wolpé
Acknowledgement: The Forbidden—Poems From Iran and Its Exiles, edited by Sholeh Wolpé
(Michigan State University, 2012) Winner of Midwest Book Award