Neda,
I have watched you die a dozen times
on a sidewalk in Tehran.
But never mind Tehran;
every sidewalk in every city
is the same flat gray.
Two men lay hands
over the wound in your chest, their hands
rest in strange piety
as if to honor the life
they cannot stop
from draining out of you.
Neda, the bullet that shattered your heart
has torn a hole in mine, and I watch
you die again and again
caught at that moment
when it seems that you might live,
when you seem surprised
to be lying down. Your eyes shift
to almost look at us
from the far shore of death.
But then the blood comes
like a fountain from your mouth
every time.
(Neda, I must tell you I am sitting
in a far corner of my country,
where we do not face down bullets.
Our sidewalks
are clean and orderly
the way a supermarket aisle orders us.)
What do you see, Neda?
What is in the wild, black wells of your
Persian eyes? Do you implore or accuse?
Is it the terror or the calm
that follows us into dying?
Or does it have nothing to do with us:
a final look at the receding world,
the light through trees or
a helpless man holding a cell phone?
Or is it nothing we know,
a winged horse rising
on pillars of smog.
It is calling, Neda, with a voice
at once soft and insistent
to mount and rise
into the pall gathering
over the roofs
that protect our sleep
over the mute cities
in which we pour our several days
over sidewalks we all tread
in our struggle to go
by hope alone.