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Sheema Kalbasi شیما کلباسی

@IranianWoman • 12,731 subscribers

Pushcart Prize-winning poet and recipient of a United Nations humanitarian award, Served in the Danish Defense, Worked for UNHCR and Center for Refugees

Shorts

I was eleven years old. My mother was taking me to an eye specialist when we were stopped by a patrol of the IRGC at this very spot. A few strands of my hair were visible, and I had grown too tall for my trousers. Again and again she pleaded with them not to take me, explaining that I was tall for my age, that she had just returned from the front lines and had not yet found the time to buy me new clothes. I was frightened, but my mother's fear was far greater than my own. Many years have passed since that afternoon. Yet when I see this place of cruelty and its power holders reduced to dust, I am overcome with emotion and an unexpected, trembling relief. To witness a regime of terror crumbling into ruin feels like learning to walk after long paralysis, like unfurling wings and discovering flight, like water offered at last to one who has wandered for hours through the Sahara. I feel a release, a memory long buried in the body beginning at last to loosen. In this moment, the child I once was seems to breathe again.

I was eleven years old. My mother was taking me to an eye specialist when we were stopped by a patrol of the IRGC at this very spot. A few strands of my hair were visible, and I had grown too tall for my trousers. Again and again she pleaded with them not to take me, explaining that I was tall for my age, that she had just returned from the front lines and had not yet found the time to buy me new clothes. I was frightened, but my mother's fear was far greater than my own. Many years have passed since that afternoon. Yet when I see this place of cruelty and its power holders reduced to dust, I am overcome with emotion and an unexpected, trembling relief. To witness a regime of terror crumbling into ruin feels like learning to walk after long paralysis, like unfurling wings and discovering flight, like water offered at last to one who has wandered for hours through the Sahara. I feel a release, a memory long buried in the body beginning at last to loosen. In this moment, the child I once was seems to breathe again.

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