For Mahnaz Badihan, poeta / by Neeli Cherkovski

 

I SEE MANY ROOTS     

                           For Mahnaz Badihan, poeta                        

 

many roots crack stone

on Persian meadows

where you abide

 

you awaken on the shoulder

of a mountain

crowded in snow

thinking of the bees

and dying light

pine twisted, sacred hatred

lost on the snow banks

this is Iran as I

dream it from photograms

in your poems, these are transit zones

through the art of poesy

 

your mother calls

your daughters smile

your husband waits

a son comes home

a grandmother sits stoically

 

no one would dare

put your stanzas in a cage

or expect you to be patient

 

you look from dawn

into wily ribbons

of a moving mass of people

 

trees grow out of your hands

drummers spend their night

in desire’s radiant nest

you are a daughter of Jalal al-Din Rumi

in the rose garden, in the jamine poem

in the poem of love and war, in the eyes

in jagged fields of meadowlark 

 

endurance burns into completeness

on rugged edges of the sun

 

Neeli  Cherkovski

Jan 25, 2015

Bonifacai Global City

The Philippines

 …..

Born in Santa Monica, California, Cherkovski grew up in San Bernardino, California. In the 1970s he was a political consultant in the Riverside area, who came to San Francisco to work on the staff of then-State Senator George Moscone. Cherkovski has written biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bob Kaufman, and Charles Bukowski,^[1] with whom he co-edited the Los Angeles zine Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns..^[2] Cherkovski produced the first San Francisco Poetry Festival, and in the early-1990s helped to found Café Arts Month, a yearly event celebrating San Francisco’s cafe culture.

………

Mahnaz Badihian

Poet, Painter….

Badihian.org