Woman, Life, Liberty

for Gina (Mahsa) Amini

You had left your hometown—
your very own Kurdistan—to visit
the cursed capital of a nation blighted
by some benighted men who took you
away, with your brother begging, saying
that the two of you had no one, that the
two of you were ghareeb in this monster
of a city we call Tehran, where the strands
of your hair became the biggest thorn in
the side of this regime ravenous for
rooting out all the young voices, failing
to fathom: you can’t burn women made of fire.

I left Iran, worried that my words
would atrophy under the auspices
of the Ayatollah. My mother’s trail
of tears bled into the water she had
poured on the floor as we said our
final goodbyes late at night, when
you must have been fast asleep,
dreaming what any 22-year-old
would dream when the pictures in
their head scamper away from
the prying hands of tyranny.

Planeload after planeload of us
the weak-kneed, the faint-hearted,
the yellow-bellied flee Iran for places
where interrogative faces await us on
every street corner, at every store
and every coffee shop. What do I tell
these people about your crime?
Mahsa jaan, Mahsa gian—what do I say
when they ask, “What did they kill her for?”
I tell them: Her name was Mahsa.
She loved liberty. She loved life.
She was ferocious. Her crime?
Exuding light in a land ruled by darkness.