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Do You Speak Persian?

By Kaveh Akbar

Some days we can see Venus in mid-afternoon. Then at night, stars
separated by billions of miles, light travelling years

to die in the back of an eye.

Is there a vocabulary for this—one to make dailiness amplify
and not diminish wonder?

I have been so careless with the words I already have.

I don’t remember how to say home
in my first language, or lonely, or light.

I remember only
delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you,

and shab bekheir, goodnight.

How is school going, Kaveh-joon?
Delam barat tang shodeh.

Are you still drinking?
Shab bekheir.

For so long every step I’ve taken
has been from one tongue to another.

To order the world:
I need, you need, he/she/it needs.

The rest, left to a hungry jackal
in the back of my brain.

Right now our moon looks like a pale cabbage rose.
Delam barat tang shodeh.

We are forever folding into the night.
Shab bekheir.
Added: Thursday, February 2, 2017  /  Previously in "Narrative" (2015). Used with permission.
Kaveh Akbar
Photo by B. A. Van Sise.

Kaveh Akbar's poems are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Tin House, and elsewhere. His debut full-length, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, will be out in Fall 2017 with Alice James Books. A recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and currently lives and teaches in Florida.

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