The Museum of Loss
For Iran and her people
One day they will build an edifice
On the hallowed ground where they fell.
It will contain emblems of kindness, of memory—
The lone rose her comrades threw down,
The frozen shadow of a hand outstretched
To pull her up after being struck by a solider,
Or the bloodstain of a street where a man
took a bullet and his friends lifted him above
their heads. And it will also hold the tear-drenched
tissues of mothers whose children were taken—arrested
beaten, kidnapped, imprisoned, tortured, shot.
And there will be tears of fathers collected
In small clear bottles containing oceans of sorrow.
And there will be letters to their children that begin
With Dokhtar-e-khoshgel-e-aziz-e man, my dear
Beautiful daughter, and prayers pressed against
Their lips and sent out to the sky, worry beads
Worn thin by the grandfather counting
The days to his granddaughter’s return,
The letter from the court denying a trial
Or the formal charges of spying or treason
for writing a poem of revolution or graffiti
On the wall demanding freedom for women.
And there will be photos too—the woman
Who was once a girl without a veil,
The boy who kicked a soccer ball in the alley,
The serious expression on a son’s university ID card,
And the man whose passport photo was left
Behind when he escaped across the border
To Turkey and never saw his mother again
After his exile in Norway.
In the large gallery there will be a room of hope—
That will show the sister’s sign saying “Enough!”
The brother’s letter pleading for his sister’s life
Or the lawyer who tried to speak on behalf
Of her client but was interrupted
And arrested herself. There will also be the dreams
Of the solitary too—the woman shut away
In the small dark cell who kept herself company
By reciting the quatrains of Hafez and Rumi
That her father taught her to memorize
But could only recall by writing them in the air.
There will be a room of the gifts made for
Their mothers that were never delivered—dolls
Made from foil candy wrappers, the drawing
Of a father to remember his face,
Pieces of old newspaper she salvaged
To make a collage to decorate the gray wall,
The small notebook a father smuggled
Where she saved sketches of women in black
Whose profiles she studied in the afternoon.
There will be a special room of silence too—
Where the quiet passage of days was marked
With a faint scratch on the floor,
Or days without speaking to anyone,
The muteness of the needle she held
In her hand to darn the hole in her pants
With only enough thread for one knee.
And it will also hold the green stillness
Of a tiny seedling of an apple
Wrapped in cloth and perched
On the ledge of the window
where a sliver of light found its way.
It will be a museum for everyone.
