Corpse of the Revolution
Corpse of the Revolution
By Majid Naficy
I do not wait for poetry
But go in search of it
Because my wings are broken
And I am left far from my nest
Where my sister
For the last few days
Has remained home with her granddaughter
Because air pollution
Doesn’t let her go to school;
Where my brother-in-law
For the last few days
Has remained in ICU
Because the sanction
Doesn’t let him find his heart medicine;
Where in the demonstrations
For the last few days
Thousands of people have been arrested
And hundreds have been shot;
Where the corpse of the Revolution
For the last forty years
Has remained on the shoulders of our people
And the earth does not accept it.
Majid Naficy, the Arthur Rimbaud of Persian poetry, 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: A Return to Nature in the Poetry of Nima Yushij (University Press of America, 1997). Majid has also published more than 20 books of poetry and essays in Persian.