TORONTO 2012

You answer my call
by calling
me

What does it mean
to mean
nothing?

Life
inhabits the geography
of time

and parentheses
open their arms
to margins

You lick my tongue
like a lullaby

My branches
sawed
by my roots

Falling—
I drink destiny—
an extinct genre

I wish
I had
missed your call

PAYÄM-DÄR[1]

You arrived at manhood
submitted
to the imperative—Iqra’[2]

in the cave—
your chest
crushed under revelation

Your large eyes—
the myth
of your long hair

You joined the mountain with the city—
the thunder with the earthquake—
poetry with faith

defied narrow eyes
guarding you against you—
the most absent from the earth and the sky—

rasul[3] of love—

Bänoo Zan landed in Canada in 2010. In her country of origin, Iran, she used to teach English Literature at universities. She has been writing poetry since the age of ten and has published more than 80 poems, translations, biographies, and articles in print and online publications around the globe. She writes in Persian and English. She hosts Queen Gallery Poetry Night in Toronto and is a member of the TOPS (The Ontario Poetry Society) Executive. She believes that her politics is her poetry. As a political gesture, she ascribes whatever she writes to an inner voice or muse and does not accept responsibility for the statements in her poetry.

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