I wrote this piece immediately after seeing the short film titled THE HOUSE IS BLACK by Forugh Farrokhzad, an Iranian Poet and film maker. The film reflected the suffering and sadness of people living in a leper colony. It made me think on how one can be forgotten and rejected and yet seek survival. It is a terrible thing to be so alone among your people.
While the poem below may not reflect the full gamut of the turmoil I felt after watching the film and listening to the poetic rendition that served as an audio backdrop to the visuals, it is an emotional reaction all the same. As a poet to not only be a poet while writing but to be a poet everyday and hour is the work. It is a lifelong commitment and a part of that commitment is to look the ills of our society in the eye and shout its name.
You can find the film on Youtube. Its beauty for me lies in the fact that it is rendered in black and white which strips from it the aesthetics that often take our eyes away from the core of a piece of film or photograph, i.e the fullness of the subject. The setting of the film is bare and narrow. The children carry the knowledge of their loneliness in their eyes and the adults are all but lost in the fullness of it. It is a beautiful piece of art. Gm.
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Listen
The devil's foot steps through the surface,
Steps through the worn leaves,
Their cries rattling the wire cage
And caged there too,
The ears of the worshippers.
Our bodies are filled with pain
Our heads carry their journey.
Listen
The birds have left the nest for the wind
And cracked shells rattle in their grief.
Who is like unto thee, oh man;
Your visage dark as an angry cloud,
Your hands melted in blood?
The hole surrenders its passenger,
The devil is here in full camouflage.
The dark thing in the shadows
Moves closer and closer to the fired clay.
Listen
To the rubble awakened in its shroud,
A child is whispering a story beneath the lamp.
He is feeding the flame with his soul
So the emptiness that keeps rubbing
Against the iris of his siblings
Will burn off and leave behind embers
That will move as a room full of people.
Listen
Their voices are singing in the hole
In the space between head and feet,
The collapsed roof of the world now a pinpoint
In the carnage of the devil's first foot.
The cave swallows the voices.
The wind carries the rustle
And the cattle hears and dreams only of grass,
Soft and sweet, green swaths of it.
Listen
To the wind
It carries the devil and the voices of hell
Through the padlocked gate of the church.
That the gate still stands is not the miracle.
That it leads to the mouth of violence
Is the miracle, the lantern held high;
Oh god. Oh god. Oh god come down.
📸: The Art of Place