“Sitting cross-legged on my own and yet I am not alone… Trafalgar, Trafalgar, don’t let me down..”

And autumn, the darling of my seasons arrived. She arrived at me when I was not looking; but isn’t that the story of unlived lives? And Autumn arrived; I know the exact time and place, where she threw herself on the night, and marked that very moment that separated the night from the sunrise. She marked London for good. She threw herself on the pedestal, right by admiral Nelson’s feet, in Trafalgar square. The winds were quiet. Black taxi cabs going around, red telephone booths standing still, London had the look of an ordinary night; except there is nothing ordinary about a flame under the ashes. And just like that, she confronted me. She bumped into my silence, ever so cruelly if I may, the way she never had. And the sun came out.

And there were footsteps that broke the silence of the lions that guard the solitude of the square. And there was the chilly morning of an Autumn that no one had expected, right there, right then.

There are moments, coloured by falling leaves, one after another, in a city where so much is to be lived. Or not. When the unexpected is too good to be true.

There are pieces that I have left behind in Trafalgar square, in that vast moment when autumn arrived. There are pieces to be collected one day perhaps, when these winds quiet down; when London stops haunting me.

And there is Russell square, and the fields. One can swallow the bitter of the hardest decisions in an espresso shot; and one can stand up again; and one can walk back. There is so much one can do, in autumn, in this city.

And there is Fleet street, where history rests. And there is Soho, where one can forget. And there is Holborn, where early birds have seen sleepless faces part. And there is the London House gates, where a story can end before it begins.

Autumn lies on my mind, on my chest, like a heavy burden. She doesn’t say a word; what’s there to say after all? She had never arrived at me with such conviction . And I am sorry I cannot be graceful. I am sorry I cannot say I understand; for I do not.

Autumn 2009, London.

Nizar Qabbani

He is my favorite of all times, he is the Neruda of the Arab world, talking of love and justice at the same time...
Just a few poem here, from a rainy summer in Montreal...


Light Is More Important Than The Lantern


Light is more important than the lantern,
The poem more important than the notebook,
And the kiss more important than the lips.
My letters to you
Are greater and more important than both of us.
The are the only documents
Where people will discover
Your beauty,
and my madness.



Every Time I Kiss You


Every time I kiss you
After a long separation
I feel
I am putting a hurried love letter
In a red mailbox.


Jerusalem


I wept until my tears were dry
I prayed until the candles flickered
I knelt until the floor creaked
I asked about Mohammed and Christ

Jerusalem, beloved city of mine,
tomorrow your lemon trees will bloom,
your green stalks and branches rise up joyful,
and your eyes will laugh. Migrant pigeons
will return to your holy roofs
and children will go back to playing.
Parents and children will meet
on your shining streets,
my city, city of olives and peace.

Orchid

I never found out whether
or not there was a reason
why they called me Orchid

never did I realize how rooted I was
in pain, until the day I found
the purple Orchid you gave me
lying between the pages
of my Hafez collection.

I never knew how many winters
an Orchid could survive. Hardly did I know
how many springs of joy
can be born
when all that matters, is
to have roots
deep in a life that stems from soil;
for death is always ephemeral

Transparent skin, waiting for a touch
Don't let the Orchid make you believe
she is fragile
Her roots are as deep as a lover's melancholy,
and as tough as a martyr's pride;


It is the cold wind running in her veins
telling all she has to do is
to brave the whipping of storms;
Another spring is always ahead...

Orkideh
summer, 2007 - Maamaani left us.
Boston

Smile

It is cold outside. I am sitting on the stairs, holding a cup of tea in my hands, this is my break out of office. I look at the river. The sailing boats are still, all in a row. Sipping over my paper cup of tea, I whisper an old Iranian song to myself, for a change. It the first Friday evening of October. It is exactly one year an one month and eleven days that I am living in the US of confusion. My face must be telling it all; since a stranger, a wanderer approaches me. He must be in his mid-fifties, his clothes are worn out, his shoe laces are following him from a distance. He could be drunk, or else, he might come and ask if I have a cigarette. I look the other way, at the river again. He is close now, when he points to me and says: "How about a smile?". I look at him, and Smile comes and sits on my face, on my lips, without any effort. "Don't you feel better now?" He says. His witty way of looking at me makes me nod: Yes. "See? I had to come and tell you what to do to feel better!". He then walks away, and I am still smiling. He was right. He had to come and tell me what to do to feel better. I do feel better. I think to myself perhaps I should keep smiling when the cascade of thoughts invade my mind. He is gone, his smile though is still sitting on my face. I should go back to my office. It is cold, but it feels warmer when you have a wide smile on your face...

"Let not talk of chains or things we cannot untie..."*

"...your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but now it's come to distances and both of us must try,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye..."

* Leonard Cohen

The wind, the wind again. I walk by the river and look at the sailing boats, lingering seductively in the hands of the wind. I envy their light-headedness. Cambridge is awaiting another season pretty soon. I should get prepared for the falling leaves. Sooner than you know, will come the indian summer. Though I am still stuck in these sticky nights of my first summer in Cambridge. I am stuck in a sticky dream, a vast moment, a vivid Déjà vu. The more I want to slip away, the more I get stuck. Too good a moment to let go, I said to the wind. Little did the wind care. I wish summer would never end. I should have known, should have known moments could become larger than life.
I shall write one day, stories of a life that I never lived. I shall look one day, at this river thinking to myself how many moments I let go by. I will listen one day, to all the songs that are playing in my head these days, and nostalgia will seep into my heart. I will think one day, of all the thoughts I ever fought, and will smile perhaps, thinking how young I have once been. I will try one day, to remember how exactly I felt once I knew I was living unlived moments that were not supposed to be the way they were. I will go one day, to every place I once loved, and will try to make sense of who I have been in those very moments of mingling with life, as if tomorrow would never arrive. I will smile one day, when I think of how broad a moment could be, when you lived it fully to the end. I will cry one day, when I think of how brief a moment could be, when it was too good to be true. I will come back one day, for sure, for "I will always have cambridge"...

Presence: Omnipresence?

"...Tell me about about London, about what you feel these days, what you experience. But don't ask me about here. Things are nothing close to what I can put in words these days. I am still thinking about the lingual worlds we live in. Summer is here, and I am wandering about, trying to read and write a bit. I am to figure out a lot about myself, about where I stand, let a lone where I am standing right now. Something is telling me that these are starnge days, do you feel their weirdness too? what chapter of time is this? Or does time have any chapters at all? I so wish you could read my persian blog, I had a piece on how i wish I could have lived at the time of the previous generation. It was a lengthy poetic piece of prose which came out of the most hidden corners of my heart, my mind and my dreams. I figured I am living in many different times, and yet in none of them. What does it take for the virtual to become actual? And when I think about a place to belong to, I realize I cannot spot one. The entire world perhaps, is where I am to reside in. It goes though hand in hand with "time". There was a time when you could have belonged to one particular geography. Now, we are all extended into vast amounts of lands and spaces by wires, waves, and words. Words travel beyond boundries, and worlds are shaped around them. There will be a day in future, when nations will be land-less. However modern and giving it would be, Isn't it sort of scary though? I had also written about the modern man; about how lonely the modern man is. Having taken off, to fly in search of the ultimate dream, s/he feels more and more lost. Not being bound to a ground, and having questioned the forbidden territories of meanings, s/he finds herself in an "in between" mode of experience all the time, feeling the pressure of having to move on, and unable to put even one step backwards. Yeah, this path goes only forward. The more you go ahead, the more you have to go. Free, feeling the clouds beneath her wings, yet she feels alone. Of all prices, that homy sense of security and familiarity is the most expensive one for this flight.

I have lost track of "time" with its meaningless linear presence. These days, time seems just like a circle to me, like a globe, round and revolving. It has layers. From its cortex to its core, there are worlds that I have lived in, there are "me"s, there are moments. I feel them all at the same time. These days, my clock shows "all the times" , i can't tell the date, and these digital numbers make me laugh. I wish I could remain "time"less, so long as I live in this country. Tell me about the city where once upon a time, the thirteen year old "me" was sitting right across the river in Westminster, when an old wanderer -poorly dressed and holding unto a big back pack- sat next to her on the bank of the river, and told her "You deserve a lot, but you will suffer a lot...". The man vanished, and left me for all these years, with a moment that froze forever. I can't describe that moment, unless I manage to capture every detail of that day, the warmth of the sunshine that i felt on my skin, the smell of the cool breeze over the river, the voice of children playing behind me, the smell of summer, grass, ice cream vans, water.... Because that was how that moment was shaped. That moment was one of the very, that got immortalized, like a photograph, like snap shots of just "being". Some moments are so vast, that words can never capture them, particularly when I am humbly trying to borrow words from a language which can never ever be enough to talk for what I feel. But it does not matter. All that matters now, is the presence of all the moments, including that eternal moment, in "now". These days, time is flat, and of an all-the-same nature. What has become of me?
Tell me about a city where I left that thirteen year old in a hot summer. Tell me about places that I later shared my twenties with. I was in Notting Hill last night, sitting right here with closed eyes. I was waiting for the Oxford Tube, to go back to Oxford in a late evening. It was cold, and I had my famous black hat on. It was a summer night here, warm and sticky. But I could feel the cold of a January night, as it was then. All it took me was a blink of an eye, to come back to this other Cambridge, to MIT, to the US of A. Times and places blended in my mind, as I made a pass to our house in Tehran on my way, and I sat at the dinner table with my parents, and felt the warmth of my mother's hands. It is as if you have departed from this body, and have become a wandering soul, infinite and omnipresent.
I am here now, nowhere, somewhere between all the places I have ever been. Some time around all the times, some person like all the persons I have been; and yet, nothing like any of them. Tell me about London, and tell me about yourself. Has "time" become circular at your end too?"

From a letter to a friend in London, July 2006.

The Ugly Duckling...

MIT's graduation ceremony was a blast. It was beautiful, my first time in a US commencement ceremony. Mira, Takis, Dimitri, Hazhir, Maryam, Rouzbeh and many other friends were marching in those long gowns (well, I need to switch my vocabulary: robes, as they are called here), and joy and pride was floating in the air. The class of 1956 were there too, for the 50th anniversary of their graduation, all in red jackets. It was moving to watch them, having made it to here, to Killian Court again. There were only few ladies among them.


yesterday, we lost the game to Mexico, there is more to the world cup tension though than just games. While watching the game, me and my fellow Iranians, were reminded on and on how political a world we live in. It was very unprofessional on the commentator's part, to constantly summarize Iran's political issues instead of reporting the game. It was distracting and humiliating. I don't understand this. Neither do I understand this crazy world anymore; how people kill people and no one does anything; how those written-on-stone- (and paper) rules of the international organizations are of no use or meaning in our world; how paranoia has taken over; and how we have become so numb, so de-sentisized to all this. We live in this paranoid schizophrenic world -or rather panoptican- of fear and terror, and nothing explains it. Games over games, and I cannot make sense of it anymore.

I belong there, and I don't know where that is...

The sense of belonging to some sort of a group, community, or people, is what we are all looking for. This uprootedness, this displacement that we go through as a people, is what blinds us to this very lost sense of belonging. It hit me at the IAMA (Iranian American Medical Association) meeting in NJ last week -where I had the greatest time with old friends as well as newly met ones- that we are all but a part of this mystique of words and sounds and emotions, called Iranian-ness. No matter how far or how long away, no matter where raised, one would feel it when the US-raised youth dance passionately with Iranian music, get emotional by Rumi's poetry, and excuse their backs when they sit in the row in front of you. It feels safe, it feels familiar, it feels "us". I was almost giving up that it actually existed. But I felt it there, the same sense of family, the same grace and honour, the same catch phrases and famous sayings. It felt so right, and I was so grateful just to be there. I felt I belonged to somewhere, to some virtual/invisible homeland, one that lives in our hearts and minds and words, one that we try hard to preserve in our souls, one that may never exist anywhere.

There was a moment, when a young doctor showed me a poem he had written, in Pinglish (Persian, in English writing/letters). I shall never forget that moment, when it just hit me that something new is about to happen, something different, something unexpected, yet inevitable. What is this thing about this language, that you can write a poem in it even without knowing how to write it... The pinglish poem was so honest, so pure, that I realized a new chapter in my people's history is about to begin. To me, the persian language is the feel of those beautiful words, woven into each other in a beautiful work of calligraphy. That is what I was raised with, what I know as my language, the couplets of Rumi written in Nasta'ligh, Ghazals of Hafiz painted in words. Right. But I cannot help but see the coming of a new time, a new era, wherein my children's children may create their feeling of that language in a different way, a way that I might not understand after all. I am attached to that language, to those letters, to those words. I know them the way I lived them, they way I felt them. They will learn it their own way. It will not be the same, never. I might not even like it. But it will be pure, from the heart, and honest. It will be a choice nonetheless. I shall remember the moment when I read that poem: those Persian words were so unfamiliar, marching before my eyes in English letters. It was such a strange feeling, yet it was fuled by the honesty and purity of those words. That moment was like a close-up of what the Diaspora is about. It was so moving.

Rain

" I remember flying from tehran to London, and then from London to Oxofrd, and thinking to myself: How is it possible that I was in Tajrish, on Pahlavi Ave in Tehran some 8 hours ago, and now i suddenly found myself on Queen Street in Oxford. I remember vividly that I could not make any sense of it. My feelings, my mind, even my body was stretched between continents, and I had to accept it. It was strange.

You will have a lot to ponder about this week, to find yourself back in London, and to make sense of what you feel now that you are back. You know, an iranian friend is going to London this weekend for 2 months for an internship, like many others. I had to show him last night, on the Tube map, the whereabouts of his office and his flat. After so long, i used that map, and felt I am getting in touch with a lost part of my mind. That map felt secure, safe and familiar. It was in my pocket for three years, I knew the order of the stations of each line, the red one in particular. Marble arch or Baker st was where i always got off from the oxford coach and invited myself to a long walk and coffee on oxford street, behind selfridges in those italian cafes, where many of my poems are signed and dated. The last time though, was when I left the american embassy on Grosvenor Street, and went to an old cafe -i don't remember the name- and wrote a poem called "the embassy". That was my last visit from London, followed by an evening in Zuma, and a trip back to Oxford. Now that I look at this map, I realized what a large portion of my childhood, my formative moments, as well as my twenties, is left there. I woul do anything for a short visit from that city this summer, but you know it is sort of not possible now. I don't know how long I can handle this anger, this frustration, for not being able to get out of this country without risking my studies, my visa and my return. Last time I was in london was 19th of June, the embassy day which turned out to be a beautiful day and eve, once I was over the long queuing for my visa interview. It will soon be a year, but i feel it is ten years already.

It is pouring here, the rain will not stop until the weekend. It is Mansoon season here I guess. A bit gloomy, and heavy, heavy rain... I envy the sky, I wish I could cry like this now. I can't, it is a while that I am carrying this unknown thing , clogged in my throat, and it wouldn't become tears. I need to fly."

From a letter to a friend who works in London - June 2006 - The other Cambridge, MA

No Words Is My Language...

There is a time zone
Beyond moments
There is a language
Beyond words
It is not Persian
It is not Greek or Spanish
It is not even English
It is the language of "moments",
And of a presence,
Floating in the air
Its words are soft,
-Yet moving
Its grammar is eternal,
-Yet unreachable
It is not spoken
But felt
It is not heard
But lived
And here I am
Unspoken, unheard,
But present, but lived
Lived along a moment, that is elusive
Present along a time,
Who is not on my side
It has never been,
It may never be,
Yet at the end of the day,
Time is a fallacy
Blind to its illusions
And life? An epiphany
Wherein you can speak a language of
-Unspoken words.



There are very few people who speak
The language of no words
Yet when they do,
Reach for the moment,
Or the moment will pass you by…



Sad? Maybe,
Yet sad is beauty,
Sad is the truth,
Sad is the essence of pure presence,
-felt to marrow-

Lasting? Never,
But eternal in me,
For the language of no words,
Is the one to be shared - along eternity-
With he who knows the word for silence



Stripped of words I am
Look! Look that other way
Where quietly disappears
A dream of hundred colors dancing in the twilight…





Orkideh
1:10 am, May 23rd 2006
Cambridge