Don’t Arrest Me!

The subject of these poems is the human being in an age of pain and gallows. This human has nowhere to go, yet they seize them and forcibly take them somewhere: they shove them into a patrol jeep, or cram them into an unmarked garage among a mass of detainees. In one place there is a little girl who, as a child, wanders the streets with her mother looking for votive food offerings so she can fill her stomach; elsewhere, at the age of ten, she has fled from the alleys of her childhood in impoverished neighborhoods into the desert so she won’t be forced into marriage. Somewhere she has run into the street with disheveled hair and fallen into the hands of plainclothes agents; somewhere she has been arrested in front of a newspaper kiosk; elsewhere, in the dark of night, a woman—stabbed by her suspicious husband—has fallen to the ground, bloody: screams and shouts in the heart of the darkness shatter the windows in merciless alleys. Every day is a day of mourning. Everywhere they chant laments and dirges, and the streets are full of shadows and the dead. The dead lie scattered on the ground like autumn leaves. When you open the door, you must be careful not to crush them underfoot. Despite the dominion of terror and death, death is not all-powerful, and life seizes every opportunity to escape prison and death and live joyfully and freely: At midnight someone knocked hard on the door We saw it was Death we opened the door again and danced Despite repression, life does not end; it grows out of death itself: No matter how much they struck us we did not die At last they buried us alive They saw we were growing Akbar Fallahzadeh earned his bachelor’s degree in Dramatic Literature from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Tehran and received his PhD in Modern German Literature and Media Studies from the University of Marburg, Germany. His first book was a translation of the play Easter by August Strindberg, which was banned in the mid-1980s due to its anti-war and peace-promoting preface. He has been a writer for Radio Zamaneh for many years and has also translated The Death Penalty: History, Origins, and Victims by the German author Karl Bruno Leder.