Photo credit: Alexander Solomon
This poem was originally performed at The Prophet’s “Tongues of Fire” spoken word event.
By Narges Shafeghati
I was pregnant with fire
that you agreed to extinguish
On your distant mind
a hall filled with people
_____whose memory haunts us until we sanctify them,
_____wrap them in aluminum foil and light them afire
but only between 4.33 and 4.51
I heard tradition is peer pressure from dead people
Yet I cherished where you were uncertain
_____and still are
I look for fire since that day in every toddler’s face
wondering…pouring my homeless love into its eyes…
young, dumb, not ready, too foolish to deserve this love
so we decided to let it go, “revisit this” in your words
_____whenever you’re ready, I’ll be there, you said
without even keeping a picture of it
not even the black and white one
I paid for
you silencing my womb
_____but thank you for holding my hand
_____while I nursed the blood-hungry machine
after repeating my question twice
you awkwardly translated to the doctor
who tried to circumvent
maybe because she was a good doctor – trying to protect me
or maybe because she had to get to 20 other patients before the end
_____of the day to finally go take care of her own family
Not sure to this day – with all that was left unanswered
not because I was running away, but because I
was running toward the life we’d build together
living (in) the question, embracing the question…
I am realizing how much of my English I learned from you
like those beautifully ordinary words like embracing
Where I heard your voice humming quietly
between the guitar strings into the 6-hours ahead night
There now is chatter of time and space for processing, fully grieving
How do I grieve fully, do anything fully, how am I fully, when a part of me is lost?
How do I give words to my anger in English?! How do I say trauma? or grief support group?
How do I complain when there is no one on the other end of the line
where were the words when I needed to cry out in lament?
_____I never learned how to curse or yell or shout or scream or say fuck you…without
_____your beautiful name into the void, I know the words for what, not the words for how…
Tongue of fire, what will soothe your burns, what will calm your flames?
I will gulp the water out of the mikveh
the water Zeynab’s family was denied
the water my father Yahya poured
over the Menschensohn, son of man, Ben Adam
you will see…
_____Remember when we had a lifetime?
It was the only reassurance
that ever convinced me to go to sleep,
to leave your eyes, just for the night
We didn’t snuggle on this couch nearly enough, not even close
Oh for lying there once again before darkness with yesteryou…as one
I walk these streets and think of all your explicit promises and implicit lies,
I walk and sing and dance with your inner child’s body language.
I go through what I will tell my father when I walk him through these streets
_____look, this is where ….and I will catch and swallow your name
_____and instead roll out a blanket of Iove with a convincing smile
—the one with narrow reassuring eyes, the one I could always tell in your face
from the other ones you give people when you raise your voice in order
to convince yourself first…you never fooled me
And I never fool baba. So in those moments, he will hold me tight
and I will look forward to seeing the pride in place of the pity in his rub
and the smile in the downward corners of his lips at graduation
instead of the pain in his eyes you left rejecting me…
only then I remember he was rejected too, by you, yours, your nations, your savages in charge
_____I promise you to graduate with my head held high, to see that
_____none of mine are there to celebrate with me
How much shame can one hold contained in heartbreak
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