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Painting by Lucy Bucknall is based on my poem "For Women of Afghanistan". The poem was written and first published during the Taliban’s rule. ~Sheema Kalbasi

5.7

I don't care if you are you and I am I. I am not some exotic flower. Whatever coat you have on, I will put it on to warm me... and the shoes however small... I will walk in them to balance our height difference. You don't need to convert for me; I have already converted to you. You see I never had a religion to begin with. I was born naked from all religions but your love.

I know that was not the point. I know there is no conversion. There is no coat, no balance, no shoes but the naked truth of me finding you first, not you finding me. You, whom will never know who I was when I was sitting on the white sheets.

Y o u, not b e s i d e m e.

And the words that are already written. The words that are already said, are already felt, and are already gone.

And I try to take them back into my empty bowl of hands. To put my hands on the chest. The chest into rest. The rest in to the heart. The beat back to the soul. The soul, back to what it was before you.

Alas! I am 5.7

Sheema Kalbasi, 2004
Published in print and online the poem has been presented in many projects including Get Lit classic slams and curriculum for educators.

THE PASSENGER

The festive occasion of a fancy luncheon,
A bat mitzvah, or a gridlocked traffic in NY
Where I go through the motions and emotions
Of having dignity in the middle of an organized chaos
Emboldening my body. It reminds me of
A train with loads of passengers
Where women sing
And whirl, only to return and to resume
The magical beat of music
With the sound of bangles and gold bands chiming
On their arms and anklets,
Toe rings and ghungaroo jingle bells
Fastened to their ankles,
Shaved scalp children
Running on top of the luggage racks,
The hard bench seats, hunger, thirst, exhaustion
And the uncertainty of the future at fourteen.
Now, many years have passed
While I maintain the high standard of punctuality In America, my home away from home.

Sheema Kalbasi, 2008
Selected and performed at Tribute World Trade Center, NY, by invitation
Festival of Contemporary Immigration Writing, NJ, by invitation

For Women of Afghanistan

As I walk in the streets of Kabul,
behind the painted windows,
there are broken hearts, broken women.
If they don’t have any male family to accompany them,
they die of hunger while begging for bread,
the once teachers, doctors, professors
are today nothing but walking hungry houses.
Not even tasting the moon,
they carry their bodies around, in the covered coffin veils.
They are the stones in the back of the line...
their voices not allowed to come out of their dried mouths.
Butterflies, flying by, have no color in Afghan women’s eyes
for they can’t see nothing but blood shaded streets
from behind the colored windows,
and can’t smell no bakery’s bread
for their sons bodies, exposing, cover any other smell,
and their ears can’t hear nothing
for they hear only their hungry bellies
crying their owners unheard voices
with each sound of shooting and terror.
Remedy for the bitter silenced Amnesty,
the bloodshed of Afghan woman’s life
on the-no-limitation-of-sentences-demanding help
as the voices break away not coming out but pressing hard
in the tragic endings of their lives.

Woman, are you the brown March Violets?
I saw an angel in the Miramar
“I carved and carved
until I freed her out”.
-Michele Angelo

My utopia brushed
an unusual current
turned into
autobiographical circulation of
devilish misplaced luck

as a woman today
I have
never had much fruit
much happiness

My parents’ ambition
not to see me sealing my body
to the sad painted windows

Men with unknown identity
without faces
decide for my very existence

My voice
a recorded statement
I am a hopping sparrow
..........Maybe tomorrow
behind the veil
the flesh
dies away
all the pain
the sorrow
of being a woman
in Afghanistan
in the year zero, zero, zero

I tried
I tried
to pour burning oil on the crying cells
on my body
Inside
only inside
the burning oil
were the poisoned houses of wishes!

A mushroom in the city-world-of universe
From trying to pass the dying
the head first and then dripping bread
comes

Shifting
from one age to another
Lively playing with death

I die-to-die and live to live
If I could only live
a noble life.

Sheema Kalbasi, 1998
The poem was written and first published during the Taliban’s rule. It has since been anthologized and translated into several languages, and taught in colleges and high school classrooms around the world, including India, Japan, Croatia and UK. Artists have incorporated this poem in their work. Picture shows artist Lucy Bucknall next to her painting with the poem written on it.

Hezbollah

It is absurd to close your eyes
and pretend that the Bahá'ís
have never been slaughtered or forced
to convert to Islam,
as if the executions of political prisoners
or the Kurds were just part of a game,
an unwritten law in a lawless land.

Extended customs, mute prayers,
grave to grave, Tehran cemeteries
black from the flesh of the youth
and on the faces of the mothers lay
chipped beliefs and spreading tears.

The News shows the Godzilla regime
-mourning over the tassels of demolished
homes of the homeless in a country
not even close to my land- sits on tinplates
of power and announces another castration.

This perhaps is a blessing from God
that when there is a Friday Prayer in Tehran,
we still cry over the Arab-Israeli War.

Sheema Kalbasi, 2004
In 2012, LGen the Hon. Roméo Dallaire, Senator from Quebec, Canada, closed his speech on the situation in Iran with sections from this poem. A winner of Harvest International, the poem has also been anthologized and published amongst others in The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles, The Atlanta Review, IRAN issue, and Iranian and Diasporic Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Study by Dr. Daniel Grassian.

________________________________________________________________

Mama in the War

Mother! Underneath the stairwell we learned to celebrate
The New Year, your birthday, my childhood
Like a scene from a black and white movie
We laughed nervously with thoughts of
Our melting flesh, the cake on the kitchen table,
And cockroaches that flew on four wings!

Sheema Kalbasi, 1998 Published in print and online, the poem has two versions and has been taught in colleges and high school classrooms around the world, including Israel, India, and UK.

________________________________________________________________

Dancing Tango

Oh, Orlando!
Remember the night we danced
quietly on the sands where music
was played? Your words were
wonderers, said quietly
in the pockets of my ears.

Oh, Esphahan!
With your turquoise blue mosques
and lovers hiding under the sands
by the Zayandehrood and its haunting
blue skies. Still the words did
wonders when they were said quietly
in the pockets of my ears.

Time is eternity, my dignity
resides in yours and your
words are wonders that I count
as precious coins kept quietly
in the pockets of my tears.

Sheema Kalbasi

This poem was set to music as an artsong for mezzo-soprano and piano and performed at Old Dominion University, Virgina, U.S.A.

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