Winner of the 2024 Robert and Adele Schiff Award in poetry
When I was a child,
my fire burned black after dark.
What is not seen
can never be put out.
I never asked,
What about me?
I would ponder the smallness of sparrows,
too many of which I found dead or dying in the pond
—floating on its algae-mirror like rufous pads of lily—
their gray bibs hanging open, darkening in water,
their bellies bloated, eyes narrowed and still.
Once, in the backyard, I dug a hole under the willow
buried two of them deep inside wet earth,
packed and shrouded their corpses in white silk,
kissed their clenched wings with reverence, muttered a prayer,
as if sanctifying saints for their next incarnation.
Then, the Tehran winter hit—
the bone-sawing snow, the razing windchill,
the war, the sparrows in my handmade grave,
their feathers turning to shards of ice,
their insides slush. Glassy parasites.
I never asked,
What about them?
For six years, death was everywhere.
I stood under bombs and stars.
Never looked up. Never.
Where would they land?
On your face or mine?
I never asked,
What about us?
Leila Farjami is an Iranian American poet and psychotherapist in Los Angeles, California. Her poems have appeared in diode poetry journal, Grey Sparrow Journal, Nimrod, Silk Road Review, Subnivean, and many more, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and anthologized. Visit her at leilafarjami.com and follow her on Instagram at @leila_poetry.
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