Half of the World

Today
I was thinking about how
I left a true river behind
To get to a false creek
And deprived my eyes of the scene of the yellow bricks
To walk amongst the white wooden boards

I was wondering if Zayanderood is still arid
If people still sing secretly under the Khajoo bridge
While I was looking at the vivid blue of the English Bay
And the people who celebrate life and liberty

But what do you know about hometown?
Have you ever walked on a soil
On which you know your ancestors
Treaded a thousand
Years ago
Or have you bought property on a land
Where its native people are
Denied of orange shirts?

The hometown is the sound of Zayanderood flowing
The yellow bricks of bridges
Taste of saffron in the ice cream
The turquoise domes
The cyan tiles
The unpleasant people
The hometown is where you can never love
Because you do
And If you do
You are a settler, not a native

And I close my eyes,
And smell the mud around the river
And taste the saffron
And hear people singing folk songs
And feel the coarseness of yellow bricks
And see a skyline of turquoise domes

Today
However
I open my eyes
And answer for the thousandth time
To the familiar question:
"Where are you from?"

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Sohrab Mosaheb
Sohrab Mosahebi is an Iranian student of English Literature at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. His academic research field is literary theory and criticism, and specifically postcolonialism. He has been writing poetry in his mother tongue (Persian) since he was eight and started writing in English in the late 2010s. He has been active in the arts and cultural scene of Iran for so many years and published his first full-length poetry collection in Persian in early 2021. He reads philosophy, plays musical instruments, and follows amateur photography. His philosophical and socio-political worldview is usually his main inspiration for his art, and he tries to combine his poetic nature with other mediums like sound and vision. He tends to focus more on philosophical and social issues and challenge what people take as self- evident in their ideologies or daily lives. You can follow him on his homepage at www.SohrabMosahb.com

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