Portside

Welfare Queen

By Majid Naficy

Here she comes

With incessant shouts

And two fiery eyes

Which like dying candles

Have suddenly inflamed

Before they finally burn out.

Passersby

Change their direction.

A man takes refuge

In his car,

A woman grabs her daughter’s hand

And crosses the street,

And I shelter behind a tree

Thinking to myself:

Perhaps she ran out

Of her pills

The day the Governor

Closed mental hospitals

To cut the budget

Or the President

Called her “a welfare queen”

To make a public enemy.

And yet

She doesn’t even have a shopping cart

To make a barricade

Or a walking buddy

To give her a hand.

Thus

She shouts incessantly

Until a hand

Puts a red robe

On her shoulders,

A crown of thorns

On her head

And a reed cane

In her right hand*.

* Matthew 27:28-29

Majid Naficy fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife, Ezzat in Tehran. Since 1984 Majid has been living in West Los Angeles. He has published two collections of poetry in English Muddy Shoes (Beyond Baroque, Books, 1999) and Father and Son (Red Hen Press, 2003) as well as his doctoral dissertation at UCLA Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature (University Press of America, 1997). Majid has also published more than twenty books of poetry and essay in Persian.