Brother Khosrow

 

Hengameh Ghaziani

Atriz iraniana

Mitra, no filme " My brother Khosrow"

Brother Khosrow

I am a Ugandan Boy

they have placed leaves on my body to lash my feet,

to make me dance

till I pass out.

They removed the leaves and what

does the sweat of a black boy do to the cannabis leaf?

They say it leads one to forgetfulness:

forgetfulness!

Brother Khosrow, everyone wants to forget.

Brother Khosrow

I am an aboriginal girl

they chained my father to two white horses

and dismembered him

by law, they separated me from my mother

and handed me to a white family,

the father of the white family

would come after me every night

and open up the buttons to my black breasts.

Brother Khosrow

I am the ‘Queiq River’

till yesterday

the young fish shared their naked body with me.

But today, I am bitter

and bring up silent travelers from the other side of Aleppo

fish with hands, tied,

and with eyes, tied

and with deep holes in their foreheads.

Brother Khosrow,

I wrote on my T-shirt

“1948”

I am a survivor of the Nakba

I am Palestine.

Brother Khosrow

You are Kurd

I am Hazara

We are full-blooded brothers

Having lost each other for centuries

Until tonight, in your small house in Sulaymaniyah

Where this vodka has made us so tipsy

We can understand each other’s language.

Brother Khosrow, Brother Khosrow

How is it a bottle of Russian vodka unites us?

Brother Khosrow,

at the very moment you and I fill with joy

the seas are moving

the mountains are moving

they cross one border

and enter another

we will wake up one morning

and the water will have sunk us all

as water surrounds all places and times,

the clothes of Auschwitz survivors hung on hangers,

scarves of forty Hazara girls with almond-shaped eyes

placed on the rope, in the courtyard

Van Gough’s small ear in the kitchen’s sink:

The earth will discharge everything it once concealed

all secrets will begin to float

Virginia Woolf’s bitter love

Hitler’s melancholic solitude and

the wounded body of Bin Laden

and you will see in his eyes

what beautiful, innocent eyes . . .

Brother Khosrow

the world saddens me

the sunrise and the

humans, turning round and round in an empty square

the church bells

my father’s voice

and the voices of the beautiful girl who reads news of the war.

Brother Khosrow during these moments of reading poetry

how many gay boys in Rwanda are lead up the stairs to death?

In Kandahar, how many former commanders currently MPs

Are waking up in the beds of thin children?

How many Baghdadi women return home from the cemetery?

Home?

Home, a ridiculous consolation

Home is nowhere,

no one gets to be martyred,

everyone dies

and rots

like those five thousand bones rotting in the Halabja cemetery.

The scent of banana and apple and milk intoxicates them:

those real scents, the scents of fruit.

Brother Khosrow

This time when you cross a border, take a deep breath

The distance between the borders smells like blood.

Brother Khosrow

the shadows make me melancholic,

they close off a tree whose shadow falls on the border of another country.

Brother Khosrow

they killed many trees

many mountains

many horses

they killed many cows

but no one writes a poem for them

they say, the human comes first, always the human!

Brother Khosrow

How is it a bottle of Russian vodka unites us?

A bottle of vodka the factory for which

is close to the rifle factory and its telescopic sights,

the same guns with which ISIS soldiers calm Izadi children

and NATO soldiers joke around with Helmand’s farmers,

the guns with which anonymous soldiers of the twelfth Imam

send the illegal immigrants of Taftān to hell

and Gulf Sheikhs shoot up the sky

Brother Khosrow

I hear the sound of tractors from afar

they are working hard to make cement houses

just like mothers and fathers who are working hard

to make cement children

Brother Khosrow

The sun slowly goes down and

A few seconds after the sunset

A red line takes over the skyline

Those few seconds

Are the best time to take pictures

I want everything to be over at such a moment

Brother Khosrow

How is it a bottle of Russian vodka unites us?

Elyas Alavi