2 Poems

Shirin JAn, I'm sending 2 poems, copied right in the body of this
message. The first one, to my mother, may be relevant
to those ones of us who are far away from our loved
ones, quite common among iranians living outside Iran.
The other one, tomorrow, refers to the illusion we
have of time, that it is infinite and that we could
postpone "doing" until the next day.

Mother

My mother is

a distant voice

that travels across the blue

through a thin electric wire

and gently scratches my stomach.

My mother is

phrases

that I swallow

word by word

letter by letter

savoring the punctuations in between,

So far away,

on the other end of the thin line

made of broken sounds,

my mother is

music.

Tomorrow

And every night I tell myself

that tomorrow is yet

another day

and that at dawn, filled with tiny streams of red rays

I will rise

O! so new.

And that tomorrow

I won’t gaze into

the empty screen that drags my eyeballs

from one dead window

to another

twisted in a distorted maze

and that tomorrow,

I shall stare no more

at the cold kettle on the stove

nor at the dripping water

in the plastic jug

I will not look at the grimaces of my face in the

mirror for hours.

I shall fix no more

the ceiling with my eyes

nor shall I count again

the ins and outs of my breath with the agate string of

rosary beads.

Tomorrow, I will simply be

another one, no more clouds in my head…

Ah! So sweet.

I will have

a plan

in a colorful time table with little boxes

for all the days of the week

from Monday to Sunday

and for all the hours of the days and of the nights

and every slot will be

so full of

activities.

Tomorrow will be

kind of angular

sharp and crisp

clear and defined.

Funny promises I hang to myself,

and tomorrows are slippery

like fishes

and flow

ah- so fast

and I,

oh-so lazy

a heavy rock that watches

and erodes away.

Leylanaz Shajii

October 9, 2002

Palo Alto