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Roger White,
poet / writer / reviewer (poetry), Canada / Israel. |
Day Seven |
Excerpts from...
Lines for a Widower In January 1982 six members of a Bahá'í administrative body in Iran, together with the hostess in whose home they met, were seized and killed for refusing to recant their faith. The husband of the hostess choice to deny his belief and was spared. The reticent saints say nothing of apostasy so let us turn to you. Were you widowed by your cowardice or did sanity grip you in its cool fever, moistening your blistered palms to ease release from the burning cord of covenants? We cannot guess waht tremors stormed your ribcage when the raging men swept through your home to seize its brightest ornament. her small white knuckles knotted with conviction as she strode out to meet the harsh divorce of bullets.... ...Do your children acknowledge as mother your cold-eyed concubine, remorse, who lays by your side wakefully through the slow dark hours listening to your heartbeat and fingering her slender knife? How shall we testify? Give us your answers, quickly. Quickly! Angry hands are beating on our door. Roger White, 1982, Israel. Excerpts from My Calamity is My Providence, an anthology of poetry in response to the perscution of Bahá'í’s in Iran, compiled by Tahirih Khodadoust Foroughi, 1984. |
Surfeited with bright social exchanges,
he eludes the convival congregation of pilgrims,
sets out for the Shrine of the Master,
walking slowly, relishing the scent,
the gentle morning sunlight, his solitude,
picking his way among -he smiles at a knot
of youngsters bound for school -the children of
Israel,
savouring the metaphor, Isaiah´s words flitting
lightly across the screen of his mind,
...and ye shall be gathered one by one,
O ye children of Israel...when the refracted light
suddenly cancels the green day
presenting to him a mirage, a trackless desert,
with a suddenness that takes his breath away.
Fishing for his notebook he remembers
the desert place of Matthew, Mark and Luke
and writes, resting on a low stone wall:
"In the sandy convolutions of this landscape
grainy, parched and impersonal as God´s
brain
perception shifts and shimmers
and the crazed hot wind mutters
apocalyptically."
...
excerpt from a 34 page epic-poem,
Notes Postmarked
The Mountain of God, 1992.,
Published by New Leaf Publishing, Richmond, BC, Canada.
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