Slow Motion
To stay alive,
One must change clothes,
One must call the insistence of the sun a day
And have newspaper’s Comedy and Classified Ads sections interchange titles.
Nonetheless, the street beats fast,
With its wretched mouth.
The hunters make the cranes fall down to the ground,
One by one.
The choral song of the chainsaws
Has not ousted the birds from their eggs.
In my mind, I swiftly change.
A tortoise is wriggling on its back.
Which one?
In which movie did they act so realistically?
A boy with red flowers has fallen down,
Leaning over her mother’s chest.
The scene is in slow-motion,
To the extent that I can catch sight of people blinking
As well as the gaze upon their faces when the frames skip.
So slow that I can see from which cell of their bodies
The syllable of each shout has begun.
Which movie?
I go. I go.
I change the street.
In the fruit store,
I set eyes upon the pomegranate
And burst into tears…
Hamid Abdollahzadeh is a 29-year-old Iranian poet whose poems are mostly about love and the situation of the society in which he lives.