What Does the Wind Want? by Marjan Khoshbazan

April Wind, by Andrew Wyeth (USA) 1952. Photo by Peter E. via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

What Does the Wind Want?

 
Sky
 
Cold and lifeless
 lying on the bed
 she wraps the sheet
 around herself
 and rolls
 toward the wall
instead of her gray feet
 she stares
 at the white wall
 from up close
she thinks
 of the paths
 she has taken
suddenly, with body pain,
 she rolls onto her back
the wind forces
 the door open
she feels
 someone from afar
 is watching her
 
**
 
Plain
 
Her hair
 spread around her head
 she stares at the sky
she closes her eyes
 and in the darkness
 sees bright
 patches of colour
she opens
 her arms
the grass
 pinches
 her bare arms
the wind
 forces her
 to close her eyelids
one coloured patch
 lights up
 in the dark
she remembers
the patch fades
another patch
she forgets
she hears
 her pulse
her face is hot
 her back is wet
 
**

The Man
 
The roughness of the tree trunk
 has marked
 the palms of his hands
his worn coat
 moves back
 with difficulty
the man
 folded into himself
trying
 to hide his head
 beneath the collar
 of his coat
the wind
 shakes the grass
from the sky
 the sound
 of a woman’s moan
the man does not know
 where
 to return
 
**

Tree
 
From where
 he has laid his head
 he sees
 his toes
he has just returned home
 his body still
 tired from work
the ceiling fan
 spins in haste
warm air
 touches his face
something
 weighs on his chest
he feels
 he has lost
 pieces of himself
at last
 he tries to rise
but his body
 like a tree stump
dried
 heavy
 and damp
 
Marjan Khoshbazan

Marjan Khoshbazan is an Iranian poet and writer based in Tehran. One of my poems was selected in a recent The Ekphrastic Review challenge, and I have also had work published recently in The Light Ekphrastic. My writing is largely image-driven and often engages with ekphrasis as a way of exploring silence, memory, and collective experience. After years of trying to write poetry in Persian, I tried to create a new language with the help of images that is not bound by geography, time, or culture, but speaks the language of humanity.