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Mahnaz Badihian (Oba) is a poet and translator whose work has been published into several languages worldwide, including Persian, Turkish, Italian, and Malayalam. She attended the Iowa Writer's workshop with a focus on international poetry while practicing as a dentist in Iowa City. Her publications include two volumes of poetry in Persian and a best-selling translation of Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions into Persian. Her most recent publication is a critically acclaimed book of original English language poetry, From Zayandeh Rud to the Mississippi. She has an awarding winning selection of poetry (XIV Premio Letterario Internazionale Trofeo Penna d’Autore, Tornio) translated into Italian by Cristina Contili and Pirooz Ebrahimi. Currently she resides in Northern California where she runs an online multilingual literary magazine, MahMag.org in an effort to bring the poetry of the world together. She presented a paper on erotic literature by Iranian women in the Diaspora at the American Comparative Literature Association's 2008 annual conference. She is an MFA candidate in poetry . A selection of her poems translated by Andrés Alfaro into Spanish will be published in 2010. She is currently working on a novel called "Like a Wedding Dress”.

New collection Of poetry /RAVEN OF ISFAHAN/Mahnaz Badihian

New collection Of poetry /RAVEN OF ISFAHAN/Mahnaz Badihian

Raven
for Pooyan

Soak your fingers in wine
plant the sun in your heart
so we can defeat dark times

Come tonight
it’s been long since moonlight
waited behind these windows to be open

Come tonight
so all the closed windows
old and shaggy
open from the rush of your aroma

I invited the raven
to come with the familiar music
from our country
to remind us of good old times
when that familiar raven flew between
treetops in our backyard
then settled on our porch while singing
intensely with excitement
as if he had important news
I remember the day you said:
“War will stop soon, because
the raven is singing longer and louder today”

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