Her poems direct social issues, particularly issues related to violence against women, underage or forced marriage, poverty and the impact of extremism and war. Her poems engage with socio-political themes and display a strong skill for irony. —Farzana Mari
Somaia Ramish
Poems translated from Persian by Sholeh Wolpé
5 /
to save me from Hell,
or rather,
get yourself to Heaven.
Each day, I die again and again
when my hair rots among your banal thoughts,
when my voice is devoured by your fanaticism,
when my womanly shape makes an infidel of you,
and my hair provokes your God’s wrath.
You who are frightened by beauty,
look how streets of Tehran and Kabul
lead neither into Heaven nor Hell.
From death, we have come back alive.
Woman Life Freedom
7/
despite the bullet lodged in my heart.
I escape toward Durand.
The borders do not recognize my aliveness.
I travel to Nimrooz
half ash
half fire
and now
I’m in the vicinity of Khuzestan.
The armed Iranian border patrol
is yet another bullet
and the price of my blood
is as worthless as water that chokes
the Hari river.
I’m alive.
I cross deserts and oceans,
survive barbed wires and
jaws of hungry dogs.
I sit across an immigration officer
who does not look at me,
does not shoot at me.
Instead, he summarizes me
into a seven digit number
Zero – Five – Eight – Four -Two – Two – Two
I run in six directions.
Halt!
I drop my numbers.
I‘ve never been alive
outside of my homeland.
8/
and dawn’s blood has dried up in tomorrow’s veins.
I cry in all time zones.
Which one are you in?
You who do not hear our voices?
Free people of the world,
you who have embodied liberty in a statue,
a stone,
a rock that has fallen into a well
and is dying with its own final sound.
After a fall, if you hear a thud,
it’s the sound of death.
Pull back your clocks by a century
so you can swallow the news of the liberty rock
with you bitter coffee and forget
that we, on this side of time,
in this side of the world
have already died in our own timeline.
