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Aliki Barnstone has brought to the attention of her Facebook
friends the execution in Iran
of poet and activist Hashem Shabbani. Among several posts shared by Aliki is
this one.
Also shared by Aliki is a prison letter smuggled out through
friends of Shabbani, appealing for help from the international community; help
which did not prevail. I now use the following excerpt from that prison letter to
preface an older poem that I wrote about our society, some twenty years ago:
“I have tried to
remove all the obstacles that divide the street (the public eye) from the truth
and make it to live in illusion that formulated by the tyrants to design a life
according to their will.”
Them
To glimpse one briefly in the flesh
is an occasion,
a topic
for suppertime conversation,
a chance for the limelight
at the pub.
Prolonged exposure, though, might blind,
could well derange a
vulgar mind
with spiteful dreams,
resentments, green
prerequisites to homicide
and crime. So they
have their hired guns,
high-voltage walls and
vicious dogs,
to buffer piqued humanity—
orchestrate nightly
on TV
(boxed high behind the one-way glass)
their coliseum
passion plays
of man and beast,
of dust and blood—
eyes strain to glimpse their fateful thumbs.
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Note: this poem is constructed using a format with which I was
experimenting at the time, based on linear syllable counts in repeated
patterns.
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