Four Poems by Sholeh Wolpé
I Didn’t Ask For My Parents
It isn’t like you bend
your dainty spirit neck
down from God’s baby-soul-land
and point to a copulating couple
who strike your fancy.
Don’t think it works that way.
You are blind-folded
and shot down through heaven’s tunnel
into life and where you plop
willy-nilly that’s your home.
The Jewish couple may be in the act
at the same time as their Muslim neighbor.
Where you end up
even the cherub who pushed you off
the edge can’t know.
We grow up forgetting
our incidental placements
become fond of whatever
bread and religion we are fed.
Listen,
Who has salvation
when we all claim it?
High Above Tehran
We are exiles, children of the dead
who melted into the earth without a trace.
And I, even at ten thousand feet see
this land as my home; bound. But look
the shadow of this plane flees too.
Dear America
You used to creep into my room,
remember?
I was eleven and you kept coming,
night after night, in Tehran, slid in
from inside the old radio on my desk, past
the stack of geometry homework, across
the faded Persian carpet, and thrust
into me, with rock and roll thumps.
I loved you more than bubble gum,
more than the imported bananas
street vendors sold for a fortune.
I thought you were azure, America,
and orange, like the sky, and poppies,
like mother’s new dress, and kumquats.
I dreamed of you America, I dreamed
you every single night with the ferocity
of a lost child until you became true like flesh.
And when I arrived at you, you punched
yourself into me like a laugh.
The Wall
She takes a nail, places it on the spot she has marked,
bites her upper lip, lifts the hammer and misses with a loud crash.
This is my cousin, the one with the Lucille Ball face,
black hair, unbroken eyes. She wants to hang
her dead husband’s picture on the wall.
The large hole in the paper-thin wall scares her stiff
as does the thought of her priggish landlord with his pinkish
eye, and his grey eyebrows like two unruly mustaches.
It’s been only a month since she arrived in London,
a lone woman, two children in tow, little money,
open wide for what may come— work, luck, anything.
And now she is terrified because this will not do, this large hole
in the wall for which the sun-starved landlord could kick her
out without a gram of pity in his gurgling kidney pie-fed gut.
She hurries to Harry’s hardware where just last week
she bought two plastic chairs, grabs old Harry’s sleeve,
and in fearless broken English cries, I have a big hole. Too big.
I want make it smaller. You help?
Harry laughs and calls over Joe, who calls over Mike,
and they consult, their bald heads together, three chuckling
chums. They send her to the shop two doors down,
and my cousin, the sight of the big hole in the wall still patched to
her mind’s eye, stumbles into the red-shaded shop, is startled
by a woman screaming, Yes, yes, you’re the king. You’re the king.
The only king she knows is the Shah, and as she looks up at the glaring
screen, sees that the one addressed with such ardor is no Shah, just a balding
blond naked man convulsing like one possessed, over a woman’s pale body.
The shop sells unspeakable things, but the one that most catches her eye
uncannily resembles her dead husband’s private part.
She may be naïve, not much schooled; she may have married
a man twenty years her senior, never looked at another, not even now,
but she knows what kind of place she has been sent to.
A practical joke on a foreign woman with a broken tongue. But still,
she needs to mend her wall, not be kicked out, eke, survive.
She catapults out of the sex shop and back into Harry’s Hardware,
her chin not down, her eyes
not averted, her shoulders not sagged.
With flames roasting her cinnamon eyes, pinkening
her cheeks, my cousin politely asks: You help me. I have a hole
in the wall. The wall.
Sholeh Wolpé is an Iranian-born poet and writer. About Wolpé’s latest collection of poems, Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths, Shelf Awareness Magazine writes, “A gifted Iranian-American poet beautifully explores love and the loss of love, beauty and war and the ghosts of the past.” Wolpé’s modern translation of The Conference of the Birds by the 12th century Iranian mystic poet, Attar (W.W. Norton), has been hailed by Reza Aslan as a translation that “is sure to be as timeless as the masterpiece itself.” A recipient of the 2014 PEN/Heim, 2013 Midwest Book Award and 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize, Wolpé’s literary work includes four collections of poetry, two plays, three books of translations, and three anthologies. Wolpé’s writings have been translated into eleven languages and included in numerous American and international anthologies and journals of poetry and fiction, and featured on programs such as Selected Shorts and PRI. She has lived in the UK and Trinidad and is presently based in Los Angeles. Learn more about her on www.sholehwolpe.com.
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