In my last trip home
I searched, frantically, for his grave
and couldn’t find it, in the
southy cemetery where I once wailed
as a child losing his favorite toy,
too young to know death’s eternity.
A man (gharikhan) I saw cozying under a tree shade
stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.
And I remember the shephard
kicking his boy faltering over the herd
blocking our taxi in Darvazeh Kazeroon,
he too set me the riddle.
Every old man I saw
in Shiraz’s Spring-colored weather
seemed to me to say,
I was once your father.
