POETRY

Dear Nilofar

I hear you! Your poem does read as much more than a story about fear and purely recounting a story about you.  Sorry, my comment was partial, I did think about changing it or extending it after I posted it but I didn't.  My short coming.

Thank you for your warm note, I am in literature what you may call an autodidact.  Literature is not my profession but in some ways my home.  My professional field is not far from literature in its fundamentals (I think). My best guess from your work and references is that you have an academic training in literature in addition to your obvious talent.  I am looking forward to more of your work, your work goes places, seldom visited within a Persian language framework or even outside of that framework.  

Dear Mehraban

Thank you for your kind comment. I noticed that you
follow my literary work, and of course others', and have an acute and
cultivated sense of poetry and prose.

Critics and commentators of English
poetry usually distinguish between the poet and the speaker of the poem. Arts
do not exactly represent reality or the poet's exact experience. I do not mean
that the experience presented in this poem is not mine. But things happened
somehow differently in reality. I actually did not fear my father. Or maybe I did not
experience my own fear, hidden somewhere in the back of my mind, till much
later. And then it was not fear but some thing else: awareness? There are things that one can experience or understand only in
retrospect. I just want to say that what the speaker of this poem narrates, with her
own way of wording, punctuation, and arranging the events, is different from my
personal experience. I hope that her expression amounts to something more than
telling a story about fear--to something like poetry, like arts.

(Mind you that sometimes I turn other people’s experiences
I heard from them is some point into poetry but use the lyrical speaker's voice, talking in first person pronoun
"I".

 Thanks again for your attention. Please keep sharing your views on my work in the future. It is
really helpful and encouraging. I wish we knew each other and could talk about
literature in person. I am interested to know if you also write and if you have studied literature. Truly, Nilofar Shidmehr

Khanoon Shidmehr

Thank you for sharing this very personal and at the same time collective poem.  Fear has always been part of our social and private experience, very few people talk about it.