Slow down camels of this caravan
Stop being overrun
Did you see the ozone cavity
Radiated an overdosed heat pack
while winter was poising for a brisk frost
Emptying on Yemen, Manhattan Project's dust pan
gathered from the Nevada's dusty desert land
Given Karachi unleashes its hyena,
targeted against Bombay's tiger
Regional traditions would be out in my ashtray?
Subtract those who would enjoy crawling into
the luxury hotel-holes
where hornets prey
There, huge cockroaches
avenge 4ml years of human reign
No check-outs, no charge
This seems too far in array?
Consider just moments ago an official ego,
was pondering on how to deplete children's rice,
on the basis of the nuclear impasse,
to keep open the command structure's pass
through a Precambrian despotic souvenir
reminiscent of a former Soviet-installed pawn
in semi arid disunited states
as in lush fields
of the South Pacific where
recollections of vanishing forests are
replaced by Intel and Microsoft's
ever expanding cheap memories
Slow down camels of this caravan
Don't you see that, the holocaust is going on,
Or cores are melting down.
Those spaceships have broken down
In the face of boundless universal shine,
Can we reach constellation X on time?
cried the space station's chief astro nut.
Whose station was heavy laden by
rich life samples stuffed aboard.
Then since the oceans were overly fished
start that damned nuclear count down machine
to capture the echoing sighs of ìanywayî
in Kyoto accords or in Rio hallway
Do not hesitate my son
Do not uselessly be overrun
by the sign
that the count down
has already begun
The nuke waste sign is so engraved on ground
That even a zoo elephant is annoyed smelling it around
Why are you so hurriedly then
Taking my soft baby away
On a tightly winded, windy, snowy day
On the same rugged, smelly coach
Which has been forced to shamefully carry
souls heretofore away
So many pre-roughed up corpses
Anguished and tortured to death
Consumed or left to decompose
Otherwise, who had to be eternally on the run.
Said sari worn, worn out woman to the sariban
As he was the headman of the caravan
You are taking my babe away
As begged likewise the old Persian poem loving lay
So far not from the Providence near Gorgan
To please slow down the pace of this caravan
Not to follow the trail laid down by the fierce
Taliban
The lay means love, not to rise above it
Or descent below an expressed sorrow
The shadow of the Jewish holocaust persists
Postmodernity arrived in broken homes
Promising the Golden Gate to the giant Microsoft
That sociological gay guy known as Jurgen Habermas
worried of being so closely campus-watched
pondered how well to convert to the political
being bored with the sociological
In the absence
Of community, in negation of immunity
Just for the hell of conscience
Inside of his Hegelian bright mind
wonders of light-years far off galaxies
awaited to be visited soon,
at almost any probable rate
If only mankind could've stayed in wait
A black hole appeared out of the blue
In the nearby Hiroshima skies
Swamping all the light it could possibly disguise
In a twin meal being pieced in between
In the guise of a foreshadowing thirsty Frankenstein
It's no more 1 2 3 4 to FIVE you must reverse it
set, FIVE, first, to zero down, to that old ìoneî
This is being called a count down
For all goodies on this bizarre bazaar
Thanks to the advent of the atomic Caesar
We are all happy holding a Cuban cigar
Doing business on dire securities
Of those who enjoy having next to none
On the streets of Benin
or those of the liberated Chad
In Santa Fe, or downtown LA
carrying black water in buckets
dying daily on less than a share
while carefully taxed diamonds
keep them secure
from the magician's hoax
I am not really concerned
What actually happened
to that filthy old-timer Saddam whose bowels
sucked in so many lives in sum
Being inside that rat hole down
doing presidential overtime
The show must go on
To prevent dear Chinese
from spending much on their cheese
Yet, they get their share of the pie
Blowing the capitalists' pipe
Calling the Pope grand pa
While remaining atheistic and shy
The Self, absolute or relativized
remains witness or victimized?
If all this is sounding sound
To an econometrically inclined mind
The sputnik was then up there
Most of Armenians down where?
If you are sociologically minded and wise
Take it that I am not well prepared
admitting to the otherwise
A publicly funded oil well will fare well
On a Mesopotamian-like bed rock
In the absence of civil rights
It is privately plotted, gain divided by
those advancing the sessions talks
On the basis of no civil rights
In the abyss of what are rights
Although legal definition of all rights
Is a task still to be recognized
Given authorities' endowing all rights
To a bunch of crooked bugs
The whole cast of these crops
Can be likened to the Stalinist hopping cops
Why are you so hurriedly then
Taking my soft baby away
On a tightly winded, windy, snowy day
The winter cold has sure rushed inside
Mountaintops are all whited up
Wounds are hard to heal
Caught under Bam's earthquake shaken beams
Singing death to earth's core
in the hands of the terror teams
singing death to the polity
or facing a Virginia punk's gun barrel
singing disharmoniously in a rip-off chorus
The play is dragging to its statistical abstraction
Physics complementing metaphysics
Tragedy is undue death of human beings
millions are joining mortality statistics
unnecessarily
How would he possibly out there
Given probabilities has survived
Stalin's ghost has come back
Yet hurriedly and always on the run
In the southern fields of Afghanistan,
Popular in the nation of Pakistan
The creator rescued the ghost's Cast
defying then the dying old Bear
They were persecuted at last
Implications long last
How can a sit-in lay say alas?
As his metaphysics mingles
with universe's physics
Dec30/03, Tehran
Poet
Mohammad Hossein Hashemi is an Anthropology Instructor at Alzahra University in Tehran.
