Full on hope
A poet that does not go away

July 24, 2005
iranian.com

Today is yet another anniversary for a poet who does not seem to have left us at all. His popularity, as well as his message, is alive and on the rise much more than anytime during his lifetime. It is as if he has hidden a magical potion inside his poetry and that potion is releasing its wonders over time and place. He constantly talks to us over the TV channels and radio stations, as well as the numerous websites and weblogs, without us getting bored or disenchanted. His books are getting reprinted every where, in any place that Iranians live.

His message is that of freedom and love. Anything else gets its identity through this mirror. The dualities of love and hate become the dichotomies of real and unreal. Tyranny is another name for the absence of freedom. Bring in the latter and the former fades away into the thin air. Sound and silence, dancing and motionlessness, excitement and despair, man and woman, God and human being are in a permanent twisting dance within the pages of his anthologies.

He claims to be the denial of the feeble dictators who rule over the darkness of blood thirsty souls. You can read his poem like a spell and the darkness opens up into the rising day of your most fascinating dreams. A beautiful girl throws a flower bud to her lover. The fog helps the men in hidings to return to their loved ones. The spring blossoms in the windows of executed heroes. A horse gallops in the clouds of the poet’s imagination. And the ordinary people’s language moves in the air in the style and harmony of great symphonies.

His poetry is sweet, happy, encouraging and full of hope. He talks about shortcomings and losses without letting despair to conquer the sunny realm of his poetry. Thus, generations after generations will have a source from which they can get inspiration for yet another endeavor of mankind for love and freedom.

His name is/was Ahmad Shamloo. But he likes to be called “the dawn.” He knew that he is the rising morning of a new era in Persian poetry. And he did his best to nourish this old tradition of crafting the Persian language into a magical composition that transcends the day-to-day means of communications into something much greater and higher in meaningfulness, imagination and human emotional existence.

Let us repeat his name again and again and wash our spirit in that great cleansing ocean of creativeness.