by Richard Jackson
You begin / somewhere/ to cry the/ murmur of life
—Parnia Abasi, d. June 13, 2025
This is a poem about hope despite the fact that it
begins with the death of the twenty three year old
Iranian poet, Parnia Abassi, along with her family,
among the twisted pipes and chunks of concrete,
amid the fragments of some missile that targeted
her apartment building.
This is a poem about hope
despite the presence of swarms of flies investigating
the ruins, searching for pieces of flesh pasted to concrete,
despite the satellite photos that hold these specifics
at a safe distance.
This is a poem that makes its appeal
to the Imaginal world of the Persian mystics, Suhrawardi
and Hafiz, of a world where rocks become clouds, where
cypresses dance, where graves become doorways to
the gods and angels, a world between this one and
the one we hope to rejoin.
I will become the most beautiful
poem in the world, wrote Parnia. I’ll be the extinguished
star/in your sky/ like smoke.
This is a poem that makes
its appeal with the rooftop dwellers of Tehran, and
their own imaginal world between the rubble and the
sky, chanting slogans against the regime and us,
hoping for a life without bombs, without oppression,
unable to see where the sun is in the sky on the worst days,
one says, but knowing it is there.
This is a poem about
hope, for it prays with Hafiz, with Suhrawardi, with Parnia
who wrote, I row into your embrace, into this poem that
cannot go on without your own fragile lines and hopes, into
a world only our poems can make, a world where they
dance with the cypresses, and chant from the heart’s rooftops.
Richard Jackson is the author of 18 books of poetry including, Footprints, The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems, and 16 books of translation, Interviews, criticism and anthologies, as well as 30 chapbooks from eastern and central European poets.. Translated into 17 languages, he was awarded the Order of Freedom Medal by the President of Slovenia for Humanitarian and literary work during the Balkan Wars and has received Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, NEH and Witter-Bynner, Fellowships.