Poems on Politics
Words To Die For
I read that the Russian poet
Osip Mandelstam was ordered killed
because he’d likened Stalin’s mustache
to a cockroach.
And I heard that Moosa, my father’s cousin,
was executed because he’d sworn
loud enough for the guards to hear
that His Holiness, the Imam
was fathered by a dog
and mothered by a whore.
And I met a woman
who was half crazy.
She’d visited her two daughters in prison
once a month for ten years
and brought them care-packages
of birth control pills.
She said: Their faces were yellow like turmeric.
It was all in their eyes.
In my mother- tongue we say
that a desired woman’s body
is like peeled peaches,
that she walks like a drunk peacock
and sees with her deer eyes.
we say that a child’s body is as pure
as her mother’s milk.
Where I come from
these days they don’t execute
the virgins.
First they rape them
and then
they shoot them.
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:: Logo woodcut by Barbara Leventhal-Stern
