To My Tehran and Her Bloody Shorts
In my city, the living speak to the dead,
but the dead do not listen.
The one who listens is a murderer,
searching for a fresh victim,
an executioner mad with the scent of new blood.
I want to return to you, Tehran.
I want to walk from Salsabil to Tehranpars, step by step,
to hear if a laugh still flickers in some corner,
or if all one sees on people’s faces
is the empty stare of the dead.
I want to help my old neighbor find his son
sooner, among the stinking corpses.
I want to tell my teenage girlfriend
that her husband is not dead,
that death is only a game of words…
though I know I am lying.
I want to learn the art of summoning spirits,
to ask the dead for the name of their killer,
to ask if they remember the taste of their last meal,
if their hearts still crave a cigarette.
I want to leave a slip of paper with every letter of the alphabet
on every fresh tombstone.
I want to tell everyone talking to themselves on the street:
Comrade, you are not mad, you are Iranian.
I want to ask my city
if it still remembers me,
or if all the living are now strangers.
Do not be angry with me, Tehran.
Every stone of you is stained with the blood of a friend,
and beneath every inch of you rests the body of a friend.
Speak to me, Tehran. Speak of your sisters—
Rasht, Isfahan, Karaj, Izeh—
of the blood flowing in your womb, not menstrual blood,
of the green of your soil, green with mold over the dead.
But my Tehran no longer speaks.
Its throat is clogged with blood;
its voice is a belch of blood.
Let me read to you, Tehran.
From Joyce, perhaps, when Stephen Dedalus,
a medical student, learns he cannot save
the life of a seventeen-year-old girl
shot seven times in the heart.
Or from Dostoevsky, when Ivan Karamazov knows
that when God exists, everything is permitted.
Or from Rimbaud, who from the start knew
this is the age of the Assassins.
You are right.
Who has patience for books anymore?
Speak to me, Tehran!
Shall I bring the finest Chanel perfumes from Paris
to wash the scent of blood from your alleys and streets?...
Ah, what am I saying—I have no money for such extravagance.
Let me bring you Victoria’s blood-absorbing shorts…
or false memories,
like telling you Parisians, even all Europeans, are terribly worried about you…
though you would never believe that.
Tehran, forgive me.
I have nothing for you but the freshly forty-year-old heart of a man,
in which forty thousand dead are buried,
their bloody hands left out of the grave.
Farid Ghadami
Paris, 30 January 2026