Iran
Mother who nurtures you
in one gesture weans you
and cradles the world.
I am my mother in ten thousand attitudes in space.
The warp of hands flailing in desperate spasms
finally lifted to the loam of gestal home:
the slip of Scheherazade’s fables
of kingdoms broken and old men returned.
In the infinite mutations
there is the single you
opaque and eternal.
Our tones flow from your fountain
who are not other than
the white-kissed mountain I summit in dreams.
Your hands that soothe me with rose water,
your eyes I trace in blue damask among the stars.
Though I left you in distant memory
my peregrinations only describe your centre
I wandered about but never touched you,
absent as the hand that wove worlds
like an attic oracle perhaps Darab recalled
or a burning phoenix likely to rearise
in the snow caps of Damavand.
Arman Kazemi is a writer and arts organizer based in Vancouver, Canada. His poetry has appeared in Canadian and US-based journals such as PRISM International and Inverted Syntax, while other writing has been featured in the Globe and Mail, CBC, the Georgia Straight. Arman's writing focuses on immigrant identity in the context of his Iranian-Canadian settler identity, tracing personal history through the lens of collective myth. He is also a co-founder of MENA Film Festival which he has co-directed since 2019. A forthcoming collection is in the works with funding from the Canada Council for the Arts.
