Today’s choice
Previous poems
Mariam Saidan
They were only worried
when I started writing at 8,
little poems, little stories,
growing up in a big city called Tehran,
cats and scared people running from
Iraqi bombs and the Islamic Republic.
I became a teenager and found a guitar
sang my ghazals, smoked cigars
I made boys fall in love – Istaqfurullah.
They said no
to me.
Like lightning to a big old tree,
they said sing in private,
Zan shouldn’t sing.
They were only worried. Not the authorities,
my family. They said the same
when I went away, worrying about me.
I was bright
and I could do better (right?)
than writing and singing
khoda-ro-shokr.
Mariam Saidan is a Specialist Advocate for Women’s Rights and has worked as a Children’s Rights Advocate, studied Human Rights Law at Nottingham Universality and Creative Writing at Kent University. She is Iranian, based in London and has lived in Iran, France, and the UK. She wrote her first journal at 8 years old during the Iran-Iraq war.
Notes
Ghazal – Farsi, Form of poetry in South Asia and the Middle East, whose first and every even-numbered lines rhyme
Istaqfurulah – Arabic, God forgive my sins.
Zan – Farsi, Woman
khoda-ro-shokr – Farsi, Praise be to God.
Geoff Sawers
Cage the ocean in a room sloshing against the walls a bee in your closed fist feel the fury of her tiny heart a mouth in a cage forced to speak a second language a rope of sand spun on a wide bleak strand press your ear to the cold wet ground hear...
Rosie Miles after Gillian Lever
Shine After Gillian Lever “What is orange? Why, an orange, Just an orange!” -- Christina Rossetti, from Sing-Song (1873) Sweet naranja, common, in-your-face cadmium, chrome, atomic tangerine. # FF7F00: traffic cone of all colours warning...
Grant Tarbard
Giblet after Claudia Emerson’s on leaving my body to science Pack the forests away in this dyed night, I won’t need them anymore, hair of thin cigarette smoke, trunk of posed opium. I is a liminal state....
Susie Wild
The Liminal Hours A chase of messages illuminates my screen through the small hours. Did I just see you? I’m sure I glimpsed you dancing, that green dress, the way you tilt your head to admire the view. These banshee hauntings my poor abandoned...
Myriam San Marco
The Cure I knew what my poison was I drank to more than enough I drank like drinking would give answers to questions I haven’t asked yet I built a cage out of the pieces of my bad self binding steel plate to hollow bones fusing old scars to fresh...
Jennie Byrne
Mute like attracts want – want ignites desire I wake up and my entire life has passed - I’m old and frail, limbs rigid, my breath appears in small puffs they’ve already chosen my gravestone, a chunk of fieldstone – small but quaint except it bore...
Kat Holmes
“GOTHS AREN’T BLACK” BUT YOU’D STARE ANYWAY, AND I CAN SMOKE TREE BOP ON THE CORNER TO BLACK METAL OR BASHMENT, IN PLATFORM BOOTS OR NIKE BLAZERS BECAUSE I AM STILL THE ONLY SPECTACLE IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. IT IS BRAIDS KNOTTED INTO NOOSES,...
Tré Ventour
Man-Made For the victims and survivors of male violence and the system that enables it. CW: rape, sexual violence, police brutality, genocide, racism. Raised by West Indian matriarchs I was taught by Black women about whiteness and patriarchy where women...
Madelyn Burnhope
Blessing at Arms' Length a setting-down ritual I can’t begin to speak a blessing any more than I can reach a coat hanger from my chair. I only know how to say come in, welcome, dear Brigantia, into the home of my hand, my heart, my hesitation....