Homeland

Norooz is here at last, darling…
Time for yet another new beginning
Harking back to a homeland I can hardly
Call my own now. I sit at a coffee shop
In downtown Vancouver—the voices
Intoning around me—an echo chamber.
Hard to think of the haft-seen arrangement,
Of sprouts and oleaster, vinegar and apple
And garlic and sumac, sweet pudding, or
Fortune-telling through a Hafiz poem—
So hard, even, to think of the pitiably short
Life span of the goldfish when the face of
Nine-year-old Kian Pirfalak comes to mind,
The little boy who lived in Izeh, a city in southern
Iran with hot-summer Mediterranean climate, where
He dreamed (“Dreamed” being the operative word)
That he would someday work for NASA, and
Where he was shot and killed by security forces on November 15, 2022.

In a video Kian’s mom has shared of her
Son, he is testing his hand-made boat for
A school project, his chubby face forming
A smile as expansive as life itself.
“In The name of the Lord of rainbows,”
he speaks.

The line is from a poem for third graders:
In the name of the Lord of rainbows,
The Lord whose compassion only grows.
The Lord who created colorful dragonflies,
The Lord who conceived of gorgeous butterflies.

In Iran, the government steals the body
Of the deceased when they kill them.
They keep the lifeless flesh and bones
Hostage for days until making sure that
The grieving family will hold a humble
Funeral, without a large crowd gathering
Around the grave singing a lament for a
Life that will never return.

The government is afraid of the living And even more so of the dead.
“Hear it from me about how the shooting
Happened,” says Kian’s mom in the funeral,
“So they can’t say it was done by terrorists
because they’re lying.”

In the name of the Lord of rainbows,
The Lord whose compassion only grows.
The Lord who created colorful dragonflies,
The Lord who conceived of gorgeous butterflies.

At the coffee shop I hear a girl—white—
Telling her company of two, after hanging
Up the phone that she believes her friend
On the other end was “fake-sleeping.”
How bizarre, I think to myself, to be
Thinking about a perished nine-year-old
just then.

Norooz today is not a New Day
But No – Rooz, the day that says,
“No”; that says, “We are still here,”
—that says—steadying my voice now—
“My homeland is Kian. My homeland is Kian.”

Siavash Saadlou is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer whose poetry has been anthologized in Odes to Our Undoing: Writers Reflecting on Crisis (Risk Press) and Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (Green Linden Press). He is the winner of the 55th Cole Swensen Prize for Translation.