An Oddly Satisfying Existence/ Leading Light/ The Anser

December 4, 2019/ Mahdi Ahmadian

An Oddly Satisfying Existence

They made them virgin again,
purged them by burning their villages,
raping their women,
killing their children
and shooting them as they crossed the border,
systematically,
the bastards knew what they were doing.
they endured democracy and death,
the heroes of modern times.
And maybe the old man looming a carpet with the hands of death
blames their darker skin or religion.
And the terror in a man’s eyes—
those that gazed at his sister’s sons running toward freedom,
embracing it,
headless, decapitated by an understatement, one 8, one 9 and
that makes them 89.
Old enough.

Shame,
his eyes,
the lens of that camera
closed to capture the image of infants thrown into the river,
while the sweet soldiers wearing pink blush tried to teach them
in that river how to swim while their hands were tied to their back.
that pit
And ultimately their aim is to create a world free from the displaced,
the homeless and the hopeless, a world of which each and every corner
is a true sanctuary, where there is no fake news, and inhabitants
will have the freedom and the capacity to live in peace, stripped naked,
with a bully above, holding a sturdy wooden branch, whipping them,
making them reach the rope’s end,
plucking their eyes out,
beating them to death
in that game,
that pyromania,
that retaliation.

Leading Light

There,
beyond the thin bars,
their hidden figures,
a flock of tired travelers,

startled,
and their darkened bodies,
gazed from the heart of darkness to that bright, burning light.

Their black and red wings were fluttering,
though a drained beating heart,
as the lonely agonized listener
gave his ear to their hushed struggle.

Gazing at the visage of the cage,
those tarnished iron bars,
and at the acute silence of natural slaves
within the abandoned cell,
despair broke his backbone. It’s not fair, he shouted
and like a fetus in his mother’s womb
astonished by the hysteric movements
of that large mass,
those hidden bodies,
ready to depart
to there, that light, that illumination.

Freeing the moths from the cage, he witnessed
how they gathered before the glazing light and their wings, were ablaze.
the roots of a plane tree,

Time stood still to show the memory of the suffering men,
the other was not to blame,
not this time,
he turned and remembered the blood-soaked reflection in the mirror is him,
that vile treacherous I.

Turned and turned,
the dodder
the parasite love vine,
upon the body of the swarthy old woman
and sucked the thick blood running in her veins.
You filthy old man, her lips whispered before she died.
He noticed the ignorance filling his brain,
forgetful he was, tired, yet awake,
You coward
A picture was in his hand
obscure and dim
incoherent

it showed a path,
there is war on,

his feverish body boiled like the spilled blood of his friends
and he pushed the buttons of the broken typewriter of his father
the one with dried ink,
scribbling words on the blank paper
obscure and dim
incoherent
and when he wanted to fill in the blanks,
he metamorphosed into a crimson moth.

Lost and abandoned,
he fluttered his wings toward that manifested nothingness,
that immense oddity of tomorrow,
but before he could free himself from the world taking him hostage,
to keep time,
making him indifferent to meaning,
he felt the premature joy of the man who killed him
with the sole of a dirt covered fetid shoe.

He turned into nothing but still his weak eyes gazed into that light burning bright.
And in the end there was a glow,
obscure and dim
incoherent

The Anser
Sitting among the taxis derma
I asked from the sad Anser in the corner:
“What was your crime?”
“I will never know! The Abject Body,
without giving an answer
uprooted my tongue with a naked dagger,
to behold the whispering lyre
giving the kiss of silence on my lips.

He washed his bloody hands
and slurped a cup of tea with bitter sugarplum,
so what? He hoped to sweeten the memory of the Yesterday’s poison?

Gaze upon the weak-being sleeping with one open eye,
waiting for death,
that artful loneliness,
to avenge him for nothing.

And his tired eyes did not go to sleep
for he dreamt about living happily ever after,

‘Abandoning home is inevitable,
for it is to the heartsick’s benefit to travel’ 1
to where that is not ‘I’,
and all is laden with essence.

Before leaping into sky,
I died in a corner
without a love,
without a family,
alone,
in the corner of the room,
looking at the fences,
the erect walls,
and there was no ‘Other’ to accompany me.

Abandoned, shrieking the harrowing elegy of departure,
half-dead in the rain,
waiting for death,
that artful loneliness,
to avenge me for nothing.

Tender was my final breath
and when the other eye went shut,
pressed tight,

my neck twisted,
as when you twist a stillborn baby stepping out of a mother,
but still, my deaf ears could hear the voice of other ansers
bidding farewell, far far away.

Now,
can you see

that damp corpse,
that rotten body within the swamp,
resembling nothing alive?”
Aye… he is waiting for the oblong tongue of power
to skin him,
suck his body’s flesh,
stuff his brain with cotton,
and sew up his wounded body with his needle-shaped teeth
and transform him into a taxis derma in the room.

1. From a Ghazal by Khwaju Kermani (Persian: خواجوی کرمانی‎), (1280–1352), a famous Persian poet and Sufi mystic.