Dear Iran
after Sholeh Wolpé
Even though I only once traced your streets with my own feet,
you wandered into my dreams anyway
sliding in through my grandmother’s stories,
drifting out of the steam of her afternoon tea
searching for a place to land.
You slipped in from the clatter of spoons
against crystal tea glasses,
from the rustle of pistachios in a bowl,
from the smell of warm barbari bread.
You crawled across the living room rug
with its deep red blossoms,
and settled in the hollow of my throat
like an unfinished sentence.
I thought you were gold, Tehran,
and pomegranate-red, bursting with juice,
spice merchants crushing saffron threads
between their fingertips,
the air thick with sumac and smoke
and the hum of bargaining voices.
I dream of you, Tehran, I dream
every night with the ache
of someone trying to read
a language she was never taught.
I searched for you in the slope of my nose,
the olive of my skin.
But I cannot come to you.
You stay sealed behind headlines and rumors,
across news screens and phone calls,
behind the constant warning
“Not now. It’s not safe.”
And so you live inside me instead
a place I carry like a hidden heirloom,
glimmering in the dark.
A city I cannot visit
but that pulls at me anyway,
calling my name
like a prayer in a language I don’t understand
but somehow already know.
Sophie Lankarani is an Iranian-American writer whose poetry explores inheritance, displacement, and memory through Persian imagery and landscape. Her work reflects on cultural fracture, migration, and belonging.
Note: This poem was recently selected as the First Place Winner of the Sherry Pruitt Award by the North Carolina Poetry Society, and will be published in their Pinesong anthology.