"Those Short Knitted Hands" and Other Poems

Those Short Knitted Hands

On top of the black velvet of despair
I lay dreaming of a golden love
and the white satins of a safe shore
and a life where falling stars
are not just some objects that are
far from my short knitted hands
to catch and hold and pair
with the moons and the Sun.

I am tired,
tired I am of all the crowded hearts
and the deflorations of the languages
that are spoken on the crowded streets of the mind.

Ah, I am too tired to learn a new language
so far beyond my broken heart
that just had picked this tired body
from the black velvet of despair
to match with the falling stars
and to hold and cherish
and place it next to the high hills of memory
and my mandolin eyes.

- Sheema Kalbasi & Roger Humes

---

It is as if we are saying goodbye each day...

It is as if we are saying goodbye each day...
rotating
moving walking
side by side
and then losing the traces.

We make signs but then walk
to other directions
and try to find our way back to each other
but then again walk away...

maybe we are exhausted from one another and need fresh voices...

you are one voice
and I share you with the world
but am I the one voice
that you share with the world?

- Sheema Kalbasi & Roger Humes

---

Death Silence

From the fields where tulips
blood-tear while perched upon
the loneliest of cliffs stands
the Angel of Death Silence
while she surveys those far below

who await her fair lips
to cry forth upon the chains of injustice
or to place the kiss of compassion
lightly on the brows knitted
from the sadness of the oppression
they feel beneath the whips
of the despots and self-righteous

but she watches, gray as the stone
from which she was carved, white
as the alabaster of agony,
her wings poised for the flight
to join the words she will never utter

from her tongue of stone.

- Sheema Kalabasi & Roger Humes

---

Who are you

Who are you
who comes to my doorstep
offering freedom from want,
freedom from need, freedom
from desire, and slavery
to devotion?

- Roger Humes

---

Iowa

I remember the quiet of the afternoons bathed
in the lush smell of humidity
and lulling songs of the cicada,

the green that was so vibrant it was almost black,
the scent of life springing fertile
from the earth, and a sky so blue
it was washed white before my watery eyes.

For hours I would lay there on that hill
outside of the small town where I grew up,
wrapped in the blanket of the gentle wind
and the teeming grass while I counted
the clouds and dreamt of far off places.

Only now do I fully comprehend
the charm of those moments
when I was young and protected
from a cruel world
by that land that always wore
its working clothes so proudly.

- Roger Humes

---

New England

Children are playing next to the ocean coast
and sand castles are built with their digging
hands symphonized with their joyous laughter.
Near the beach, sea rocks are thirsty to move
from sitting next to the New England attic rooms.

The air is cooling down and the little kids
are now nesting on the rocks, trying to get away
from the cool summer breeze, chilled afternoon winds
and the dancing waves.

My little girl is one of the children, and with dreamy eyes
she is pretending to be waving at the Beluga Whales,
the wave makers of the seaŠfrom coast to coast.

The beach and the people are getting ready for
today's close-up and I hear my voice: "Dokhtaram, Bia!"
we have to say good bye to the sea and the whales.

Her little body fully clothed floats across
the air, arms in the hands of her father
and after two more rotations, is satisfied to close
her wings for the evening ride.

She slips the shelves and shadows of
her new found friends within the
walls of her night's dream before
another summer-morning lights the start of the day
for her to watch the length of her footsteps
on the sands next to the whitewaters and dancing waves.

Dokhtaram, Bia: in Persian it means "come my girl"

- Sheema Kalabasi

---

Mashehad

She is standing behind the window
and looking through it she finds me,
her daughter kneeling before God,
praying in the language of the believers.

She walks into my memory,
pushes the Solaris nerves
and finds herself swiftly afloat
with the Choghok of my thoughts.


She is just a soul from Khorasan,
land of Imam Reza, sweet melons
and the famous poets,
and she finds her way into
the memory lines where the images start
rolling down tear-pearling my face
once on the way back to Tehran,
"Stop the car, please! I want to buy
melons of Khetteh Meshehed," she said.
"These are sweet as honey," she said again,
but we cut to eat and tasted one after another
and none were as sweet as she proclaimed!

Zengecheh, Choghok these are
my vocabularies from the dialect-accent
she had. Nothing remains of her body,
and all there are, are the memories
pearling down my eyes, my face.

---

Mashehad: is the center and capital of the Iranian state Khorasan. My mother's birthplace
Solaris: The 1972 Russian movie, "Solaris," based on Stanislaw Lem's novel. It is a story of a planet that reads minds, and obliges its visitors by devising and providing people they have lost, and miss.
Choghok in Mashehadi it means sparrow
Khorasan is a state in Iran.
Imam Reza: The eight Imam of Shi Muslims
Tehran: Capital of Iran
Khetteh: area in Mashehedi
Zengecheh: In Mashehadi it means the elbow.

- Sheema Kalabasi