Siavash Saadlou
Sequence I: Post-Bellum Play
Sometimes I am a little boy—
a two-year-old, one, or
just born—perched on
your strong shoulders,
marveling at the world.
Together,
father and son,
we brave the war.
Together, we dash along
the wall in the living room.
I show you the way.
Your gun is loaded!
You’re ready to take orders,
ready to play the good soldier.
But the enemy knows just
what to do, when to fire,
who to kill.
The enemy always
takes out the finest,
the liveliest, the youngest.
The enemy always denies me
your strong shoulders.
Sequence II: Grief
I am grappling with grief today.
Let me rephrase that. I am grappling
with your grief today. It’s insane
to be grieving someone all your life—
or maybe not?
Emily Dickinson wrote of the “heft
of cathedral tunes.” But I am no
Emily Dickinson. I am Siavash—
Sea of Ash—and I want to write about
the heft of grief—the heft of your grief.
Isn’t it funny that grief and gravity
share the same etymology?
Gravis, in Latin, means heavy.
Your gravity pulls me to itself,
and then I end up with your grief.
Some say the eight-year war claimed
half a million Iranian lives. Yours is
the only one I would kill for, if only
my hands could remain steady on the gun,
if only I could pull the trigger, I would—
but I am your son, and killing was never
our thing, or else you would be alive today,
writing polemics against the horrors of war
—poems about what it’s like to be alive,
words that would have disarmed grief
for all the rest of us.
Sequence III: Crossed in Love
In a quarrel with a lover I attempt to explain
My strong reaction when she almost chokes on
A bite from some apple. Panic has set in—a
State of semantic paralysis, a vague longing
To make sense of my premature grief when
Her coughing wouldn’t stop, when her eyes turn
Almost as red as the shiny apple she had been
Nibbling at seconds before.
How to tell her that it’s not the fear of loss
Itself that’s eating me up but the inability to
Stop it from happening? Stop the callous coughs—
Stop the tears from streaming down her winsome
Cheeks, stop the bite from messing with her tender
Voice, her tenuous windpipe—stop my father from
Leaving me for some war without returning, stop the
Shrapnel shells from hurtling at 300 feet per second,
Fulfilling his desire to die young, making it so that he
Can never again hold his three-month-old son to
Prepare him for moments such as this one.
“You don’t understand,” I hear myself say
While she begins to laugh off the incident
That is now behind us. “You’ll never get it.”
I hang my head down sulking like a child,
Feeling her eyes innocently following me
about the room.
“Just look at me,” she says. “Just look.”
Can you see me? Her eyes demand to know;
Don’t you think it’s possible for me to love you
Without ever comprehending all your wounds?
“My dad was killed on the very last day of the Iran-Iraq War which, metaphorically speaking, marked the beginning of my personal crusade—a battle against atrocity and hysteria, against tendentious reporting and mendacious propaganda, against devotional insanity and emotional inertia. Poetry afforded me the aesthetic means, as well as the authentic vernacular, to process the traumas of a war-tinged childhood.” —Siavash Saadlou
Siavash Saadlou is a writer and literary translator whose short stories and essays have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His poems have appeared in Saint Katherine Review, CIRQUE, and Porter House Review, among many other journals. They have also been anthologized in Odes to Our Undoing (2022) and Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and Its Diaspora (2021). Saadlou is the winner of the 2023 Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize and a recipient of the Cole Swensen Prize for Translation. He is currently working on his memoir, Congratulations and Condolences.