بازگشت به باغ گوته – شعری از مجید نفیسی

For the Anniversary of the February Revolution

        A Return to the Garden of Goethe

        By Majid Naficy

If your son asks you

When was the best day of the Revolution

What will you tell him?

Will you say instantly: February 11, 1979?

The day you opened the gate of Evin Prison alongside the people

And saw  huge colanders of steaming rice in the kitchen 

Which old jailors had rinsed for their lunch

And new jailors cooked for their dinner,

And you with your lover Ezzat Tabaian

Stepped into a labyrinth of solitary cells

And for a few endless minutes

Were trapped behind an electronic door

From where Ezzat three winters later

Was sent to the execution field.

Perhaps you will say: January 16, 1979

When the Shah fled Iran for the second time

And the statue-breaking rebels at a Tehran square

Dismounted his father from his horse

And in the dark, you picked up a piece of his hat

From the ground as a keepsake

And told Ezzat at your side

That you did not know if you were awake or asleep

Just as the night when you made love

For the first time

And you rubbed your eyes in disbelief.

No! No!

You miss neither of these two days

Because the new prison is more horrific than the old one

And the new tyrant more ruthless than the previous one.

You miss only one night

When in October 14, 1977

At the fifth night of Ten Nights of Poetry

With your novelist friend Hooshang Golshiri

You walked to the Garden of Goethe in the rain

To listen to “Songs of Prison” of Saeed Soltanpour

Who had just been released from prison

Roaring like a wounded panther.

In those bright ten nights

Sixty members of the Iranian Writers’ Association

Gathered from four corners of the country in Tehran

To speak of truth and beauty polyphonically. 

Omran Salahi read a poem in Turkish

And Tahereh Safarzadeh an ode to Islam.

Neither the first enraged the Persian speakers

Nor the second provoked the leftists.

Thousands and thousands of lovers of poetry

Had gathered there from across the country

To testify that poetry

Demands freedom of expression.

In those ten bright nights

Did the novelist Islam Kazemiyeh know that two decades later

He would suffocate himself in Paris?

Did the scholar Mostafa Rahimi foresee

That years after suffering torture and prison

He would jump off the roof of his house?

Did the novelist Behazin predict that after arrest

He would incriminate himself on state TV?

Did the poet Saeed Soltanpour know

That on the night of his wedding

He would be arrested and executed soon after?

Was the poet Siavash Kasrai aware that at his end

He would perish powerless in Kabul…no, in Vienna?

In the Nights of Poetry the discourse was freedom and equality

And nobody spoke of the “divine” law of stoning.

No one knew that on January 7, 1978

The clergy would raise their flag in Qom

And gradually the slogan of Islamic Rule

Would replace the slogan of Housing and Freedom.

Come, return to the Garden of Goethe’s Poetry

Sit again under rain-laden trees,

Oblivious to riot police

Talking to each other on their walkie-talkies

Behind the walls of the Garden,

And listen to Maryam, the daughter of the translator Mohammad Qazi

Who is reading her father’s speech for you.

Alas! A  surgeon’s knife had severed her father’s vocal cords 

But thankfully did not remove the essence of his speech.

Come, return to the house of science and art

And regard only the heart of the individual

As the House of Faith.

Come, and from the refreshing Garden of Goethe

Return to the best days of the Revolution.

Perhaps in this journey

Your son will accompany you.

        November 17, 2011