The
Poems: I first encountered Sheema
Kalbasi through one of her poems, Now that is forgotten,
in the online magazine, The Iranian (www.iranian.com). The poem,
written in
journal form, is a gut wrenching portrayal of the effects of 9/11
on an individual. As I often do when I find
a poem on the Internet that truly moves me, I emailed Sheema to compliment
her effort. I have found that when you write a poet it usually is
a three email venture: you compliment, they say “thank you,” you
say “you’re welcome,” and that is the last you
hear from them. However, Sheema and I continued to write each other
and a friendship ensued. In her I found a remarkable
artist and person: an exile from Iran who has lived in several countries
and now the United States, a poet,
a painter, a photographer, and a woman truly concerned with the ordeal
of the people in her native country and with the plight of oppressed
and
down-trodden
in the entire world. She probably described
herself best in our poem If Hell Had A Paradise (Don’t You
Follow Me): ...I
am not the first ever woman to be born of the blood and the fire...don’t
you try to silence me...I am in the middle of my innocence...my
devotion is to love...my passion
is to truth...my private side is just a collection of my public
dimensions...and my displacement is the story of a soul grooming
her roots in a far
away land... Our partnership as co-authors
began quite accidentally. She was working on a poem, I Am Woman,
and sent it to me for some feedback. I was working on a poem of my
own and set hers aside. For my poem I was doing some background research,
reading an arcane text, The Arabic Gospel of the Infancy of Our
Saviour,
when I came upon a verse that I thought tied quite well into her
poem. I proceeded to flesh out her effort. I had no idea what she
would think of it, so it was with bated breath that I hit the send
button. However, she was delighted, and after some emails back and
forth to finish the poem, she sent it off to an online Iranian women’s
magazine, IranDokht (www.irandokht.com) who published it. IranDokht interviewed
Sheema and during the interview asked her about the poem. They were
very interested in the cross-cultural, cross-gender aspects of the
work. They asked her if there was going to be more. She told them
yes and said that, in fact, we were going to do a book. Sheema then
emailed
and told me about it. I readily agreed to work with her. That was about thirty
poems ago. We work entirely through email. We have never physically
met, and at this stage haven’t even talked on the phone. We
have no set process. Sometimes she starts a new poem or I do; sometimes
one of us brings up an old one that never
worked right or was never finished; sometimes I pull some entry from
her blog (zaneirani.blogspot.com) and start there; a couple
of them are poems we have written individually that didn’t
work on their own, but when combined together in a two voice call
and response, like a song, they do. What has developed is
a collection that deals with exile and rebirth. For Sheema
the exile is evident and physical, an Iranian living in Diaspora;
the rebirth is building a new life in a new country and the hope
generated by the realization that our "immortality" comes
from our families. For me, the exiles of my life have been of my
choosing;
the rebirth
at
present
is family,
but also finally coming to terms with my poetry. The poems themselves are
a hybrid of Iranian and American styles, although I find myself sinking
deeper into the Iranian aspects of our work as time goes on. This
is not an abandonment of my “poetic roots,” but a validation
of the direction my voice has been heading since I first started
dancing with the muse. One of my descriptions
of Iranian poetry is “word painting.” Images are lush
and thick, laid on somewhat like an Impressionist canvas. The poems
are written passionately, springing from the heart and the soul as
well from the mind. After the dealing with the wasteland of Western
poetry with its cerebral brevity I feel like I have finally “come
home.” With the kind help of Sheema I am discovering this side
of my voice and soul. I once read a description
of Iranians being as passionate about poetry as Italians are about
opera. I must concur with that statement. I feel fortunate to have
entered this world, as I feel fortunate to have discovered Sheema
as a friend and co-author. As the friendship and care has deepened
between us the quality of the work has improved. We both look forward
to seeing what will develop with our artistic partnership. Roger Humes
Come Stand By My Window:
The
Poetry Of Sheema Kalbasi & Roger
Humes
(Photo by Sheema Kalbasi)
The Poem That Is Never Written
Song Of Exile
Peace
Buried Ashes
The Patience Stone
We Build Crystal Cities
Good Night Baby Girl
13 Oct 03
More
poems by Kalbasi & Humes are available at: http://www.electrato.com/art/poetry/come/index.html
The Poem That Is Never Written
I am the voice that is never heard.
I am the heart that is never touched.
I am the lone child
sleeping hungry
on a rainy night.
I am the woman who
is a widow
at twenty-five.
I am the farmer
who lost his land
to the drought.
I am the old who
see their lives end sadly.
I am the young who die needlessly.
I am the mothers who weep ceaselessly.
I am the fathers who watch helplessly.
I am the dispossessed.
I am the confused.
I am the lonely. I am the lost.
I am the sadness
that burns like a lone candle in your eye
when you quietly remind me that such worlds exist.
I am the sadness of a soul that knows you are right
but cannot find a way to soothe the scars.
I am the poem that is never written.
When I go out to the street,
I leave my head and heart at home,
to remain anonymous,
and stay alive.
- Peyman Vahabzadeh
The sun has long set on the
lion
while in flight the voice of the crow
mocks those who have exchanged
the toppling of statues for misguided
oppression where God’s name is taken in vain
by the cruel and self-righteous who fear
the freedom for which we have so long yearned.
When the mob rules are we all alone?
In the darkness we pass the
salt and the wine
across the table of exile beneath a gloom
where the wick of the lamp is trimmed by our fears.
Our voices talk of the day to day occurrences
but our thoughts are never far from the millennial dawn,
its left eye open, peeled blood, day and night,
night and every day, and each spring arrives
with one less year not to be back where we were born.
How long must we taste the dust
of despair,
deep in our throats, choking the hope from our lungs and hearts?
We turn to our language,
we turn to our history,
we turn to our poems, packed in the cedar chests of our aspirations.
We pull them from the drawers to view their memories
and connections to our past, almost sacred heirlooms
which are us and ours alone.
We fly in search of the sacred tree
within the sea that runs deep in our veins
for without such dreams we would be lost
and sucked dry of the desire to continue.
Sometimes we sit in the park
and watch the children play
who are heedless of where our journeys have taken us.
We pray they will never experience this feeling of displacement
that clings to our shadows and every breath.
Yet in our hearts we know how can they search
the sadness in our eyes and not be aware
of the Diaspora that walks hand in hand with our souls.
How can a life go by so quickly yet take so long?
So we sit and you gently squeeze
my hand through the unspoken words
as we watch the crimson fingers of a setting sun
and remember the toppling of the statues and the times
when the salt and the wine were not merely a passage
to an era when we assumed life would be an endless parade
where all of our days would blend as one
in a land whose name fills us with a hunger we can never satisfy.
In the end we both know
we cannot remain voiceless, we cannot remain dry,
we cannot be the seedless flowers,
we cannot be the unwritten songs,
we cannot be the broken pens,
we cannot be the burned bridges
where God’s name is taken in vain,
where the wick of the lamp is trimmed by our fears.
For if we give in to the despair
and the silence
they will have won,
and exile shall become
a burkha that we are forced to wear to cover our sorrows.
Imagine my face on yours,
your eyes on mine,
imagine your words in my mouth,
your hand in mine.
Imagine the thoughts
of an immigrant
walking naked with just one little scarf
to cover one part,
freedom,
from growing tired in the mud.
Imagine my hands in yours,
white and black or black and white.
Imagine the soft against the rock.
Imagine the war and the peace
and the thin line of love or hatred to cross.
Imagine one word to write.
One word to keep.
One word to say.
One thing to wish.
Imagine you have just one time
the right to dream
of the peace and not the war.
Listen again. One Evening at the close of Ramadan,
ere the better Moon arose,
In that old potter's shop I stood alone,
with the clay Population round in rows…
- Omar Khayyam
When I went to Iran
to see our homeland
after years in self-inflicted exile
I walked to the end of the silk road
of my memories and wept.
With pain and sorrow
I saw a dreadful,
poverty-stricken dark land
of beggars, of barefoot children
with cheeks of tan and dust,
of a dying-blood-red sun trying to breathe
through the thick heavy clouds.
The peoples’ bellies
were filled just enough
so they could survive
- survive to see more of the misery,
survive to receive
token dowries and pastries
for the blood of
their raped virgins
in the prisons of
oppression, survive
to see fellow human
beings buried in a hole
up to their chests,
stoned to death
by a murderous mob
of howling beasts,
survive to find
that questioning,
yes, even questioning,
this bloodbath
was punishable by
death.
…so much for
freedom
…so much
for hope
…so much
for justice, and above all
…so
much for our human dignity…
In the end, there
is no excuse
to support Satan in the face of God.
There is a song that is sung
by the crested bird
on the shoulder of the wise king.
There is a poem that is painted
by the shattered mirror
from where we all came.
There is a stone, smooth,
sleek, round, cool, that I hold
in my hand and to which I whisper
the secrets that I am frightened
to let be known by the world
until the stone is filled
with the longing and anguish of my soul.
Sated and overflowing
it explodes, and I take the dust
and the fresh velvet ropes
of my thoughts
through a window full of sand
where I paint the night sky with your name.
We build crystal cities
in the skies of our minds,
only to watch them fall to the Earth
on the tail of a fiery comet - the dark
husk of the smoking soul is all that remains.
We swim in the pools of imagination,
diving deep in the cool blue of the waves,
becoming primordial, fusing with some
distant memory that attaches us
to the world, until we realize
that the body that floats upon the surface
is all that lingers of the promise
of what we once were.
We run through the forests of
emotion
with the wolves of the heart at our heels
in search of the moon and the blood, in search
of the perfect prey to lay between our jaws
as we wait for the sweet music
of when bones and hope crunch
beneath a savage assault
and dreams are left a corpse
lain to rest under the ethereal light.
And then one day suddenly
we are old,
so old,
and we close the book, walk
away to never look
back or question, only to long
for the wind to finger our face,
for the water to cleanse our body,
for the touch of the grass at our running feet
but we never look back
(at the end)
we never look back
(savage innocence)
we never look back.
I open the window
so that she can hear the sound of the night,
so that she can smell the fresh scent,
and when the rain starts
she will hear her mama again
walking quietly as a breeze of air
to cover her from the cool of the storm.
Watch her gently as she stirs
slightly,
amazed by the face, so small
and innocent, that reflects the generations
back through untold time, that moves
toward a future shaped and molded
by who we are, by from where we came,
by the question mark of where we are today.
Notice the little hand
that clutches the blanket, so perfectly
formed, sculpted by love and
the grace of God, the hand which someday
perhaps will cover with a blanket
her own baby girl and remember the moments
when she was young and knew
even in her sleep that mama was there.
Reach down and the fingers so
tiny,
so fragile yet so strong in their quiet slumbered love,
unconsciously wrap around mine
and transmit pulse through my body,
circling, snaking, dancing through me
with a warmth that runs from my heart
to my womb, and reminds me of the bond
that will connect us for as long as she lives.
Tip-toe from her room and return
to mine,
slip between the blankets lest I rouse him
from his rest, although I wouldn’t mind,
for at this moment it would be wonderful
to disappear into a small nested universe
where twined beneath the lullaby of the rain
we would remember the miracle
from which she came.
Letter to the Authors:
Roger Humes
at rbhumes@csupomona.edu
Sheema Kalbasi
at sheema58@hotmail.com