Soodabeh Saeidnia – Three Poems

 

For My Son’ Birthday in Kyoto 2006

The day you were born,
I was riding a bicycle alongside the Kamo river
respiring Sakura which were blooming
in the short memory of the cherry twigs
on the leafless trees

I was running for a loaf of bread,
repeating the fifty Kanji,
I wasn’t able to read the Tofu’s label

I was setting the NMR
watering the mints and sages in the greenhouse
inhaling a mix of ethyl acetate and chloroform
draining the DNA’s gel in ethidium bromide
regardless of its carcinogenic sign
The day you were born, delivery wasn’t painful
but loneliness was; thinking about your future was
fear of raising you in the blur

I used to breathe in the fearful atmosphere
but your innocent eyes were a reasonable excuse
to keep riding bicycle beside Kamo-gava
to smell the scent of a burning Agarwood
inside a bowl of bamboo in Gosho Shrine


Euphoria

Summer is the hum of cicadas
and the cicada, an euphoria of the fresh meadow
and the meadow, Waltz with the rhythm of wind
and the wind, a feast in the sunshine
and the sun is now igniting the swing
and the swing, tired of the weight of my thoughts
and carefree thoughts, flowing in every direction,
and leave me with the fatigue of the swing
and the heat of the smoldering sun


Occupied

My poems
and your doubts
shared a same location
in your heart
and cohabited
until
the poems rebelled
and occupied it all
Now, there is no room
for your doubts

 

Author’s Statement on Beauty

Beauty is a special setting of mind in a way that feelings and thoughts walking through the same overpass or underpass during their journey either in the same or the opposite direction. You can change your setting by increasing the height of overpass or enhancing the length of underpass. You can build a new path in an unknown area of your mind or destroy the old bridges and replace them with the modern, high-tech structures. I like to keep the old paths as the memorial signs in my mind. They always remind me of the long road of journey, its joyful and fearful moments.

Soodabeh Saeidnia lives in NYC but originally is Persian. She got her Pharm D and Ph.D. of Pharmacognosy and has worked as a researcher, assistant and associate professor in the Kyoto University (Japan), TUMS (Iran) and University of Saskatchewan (Canada). She is interested in English literature and poetry, and has published a collection of her poems, Words for myself, in Farsi. Her English poems have been published in different anthologies and literary magazines including Careless Embrace of the Boneshaker (by Great Weather for Media) Squawk Back, Indiana Voice Journal, Scarlet Leaf Review and Sick Lit Magazine. The first collection of her contemporary poems Street of the Ginkgo Trees, and also the newly released anthology Voice of Monarch Butterflies (she is the editor) are now available on Amazon. More at: soodabehpoems.wordpress.com.