Traces I by Zaira Ahmed. Courtesy: ArtChowk Gallery.
Translated from Persian by Abol Froushan
You are shot there
so your red cells flower … in Freedom Avenue
you die
so snow
with its white cells
soft and softly
will shroud you
will hide you
so an ill wind won’t blow
to steel you who were not one of them
You are not one of them
your arteries are arteries of a city
that which beats in Revolution Square
is still your heart
which sends off
one by one
all taxis down any street that leads
like a dark vein
toward my heart
in Freedom Square
We both fight in the same street
you are shot there
I die here
~Â Ali Abdolrezaei
Ali Abdolrezaei was born on 10 April 1969 in Northern Iran. He graduated in Mechanical Engineering from University of Technology (KNTU) in Tehran. He published his first book of poems ‘Only Iron Men Rust in the Rain’ at the age of 19, and has since published 34 books, which have been translated into more than 13 languages. Ali left Iran in September 2002 after his protest against censorship of his last book to be published in Iran, ‘So Sermon of Society’, which led to being banned from teaching and public speaking. He now lives in London, UK.
Abol Froushan left the Shah’s Iran to live and study in London in 1975. Froushan has a multicultural approach to language, evident in both his Persian and English-language poems. Together with Ali Abdolrezaei, Parham Shahrjerdi and Mansor Pooyan, he formed London Skool, a band of multilingual poets and critics whose aim is to create poetry and texts through a hybridisation of languages, genres and lifestyles, challenging accepted norms, shaking up literary standards and proposing new directions for exile and post-exile literature.
