Song and Wind

i. Prelude

I am a crow disguised
as a nightingale. I sing
the warbling notes
that lead my people
to easy sleep, content
that all is well beyond
their window. Listen
and I will tell you

all you wish to hear:
that I am warm enough
beneath these feathers,
that I don’t miss those birds
that flew away in the storm,
that this pencil-thin branch
is all the home I need.

My heart, of course,
is all crow – oiled
black feathers, the repetitive
squawk of a muscle
that knows better. It beats
against my chest – peck,
peck – asking only what
it needs to survive.

ii. Before

On leaving Tehran my mother —
usually a nightingale — disguises
herself in swathes of black, hides

between her husband and son
on the way to the airport, her words
(if any) lost to the roar beyond

the windscreen. I turn away from
the noise to see a bird crouched
between my father and brother.

The only black crow I’ve known
all my childhood, my grandmother
Maman Bozorg, is left behind.

iii. Transition

Why is a bird born with wings

if not to stretch its feathers

and fly? Its song never alters

as it moves across hemispheres,

continents. Settling on new land,

it doesn’t forget a cliff, the shape

of a body of water, its own nest

in the crag of some far-flung stone.

What is a haven but song and wind?

iv. Official

After twenty-five years, I have now
been made official. I pass an official test,
then make the application and wait.

A letter says my case is exceptionally
complicated, but little else. I take out
my Iranian passport, its leather cover

opens like the black wings of a bird.
My pigtailed-girl-self stares back at me,
eyes still dark, with hands smelling

of Shomal roses and the pine trees
at the shore that filtered the summer light.
Now I can hear Maman Bozorg’s

voice, gone a decade. Some nights
I fly across the frail border to visit.
But my papers arrive, the swearing in,

the taking of their solemn oath.
I am a citizen of another – my third –
country. I’m told I’m British.

v. Memory

This shore could be the Caspian,
the sand a particular shade of oat
or straw, shallow waves along

a lip of clear water. How can I
have spoken out loud for forty
years without a mother tongue?

What is speech but a conversion,
the flip of thought, an attempt
to be understood; words form one

from another as waves approach
a shore and are let go. How do you
lose a language? Will it ever be

as simple as the spent swell drawn
back into a waiting sea, that bird
tapping against your window,

one ripe pomegranate picked from
the bottom of your garden, a knife
laid ready across the empty plate?

vi. Present

Here at home in southwest Scotland
one thousand crows roost in pines
at the shore. When they raise into sky

the dark cloud blots out the light,
their wings silenced by shrill cawing.
They shift from tree to tree and never

leave. In this part of the world, there
are no nightingales. Someone tells me
I am not Iranian enough, then asks me

to write what little I must remember.
Who doesn’t recall childhood? Who
could forget the stand of pines behind

our shore finally bending to the autumn
wind? Who doesn’t hear her grandmother’s
voice in prayer, just before the day ends?