AUTHOR ROSALIENE BACCHUS


Reaching minds and hearts through storytelling



POEM "MY EMPIRE" BY IRANIAN AMERICAN POET KAVEH AKBAR



KAVEH AKBAR, born in Tehran, Iran, is an American poet and professor. Born to an American mother and Iranian father, he was a toddler when his parents moved to Pennsylvania. Kaveh was five years old when they moved to the Midwest, living around Milwaukee and Indiana. The Midwest feels like home, he shared in an interview.


Akbar earned his MFA at Butler University in Indiana and a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University. He currently teaches at Purdue University (Indiana) and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College (Virginia) and Warren Wilson College (North Carolina). Since September 2020, he serves as the poetry editor of The Nation, America's leading source of progressive politics and culture.


His published collections include Pilgrim Bell (2021), Calling a Wolf a Wolf (2017), and Portrait of the Alcoholic (Chapbook, 2017). He is the editor of the forthcoming The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse: 100 Poets on the Divine (2022).


Akbar's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Paris Review, Best American Poetry, and many other magazines.


He has received the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.


Author Photo by Hieu Minh Nguyen featured on the Author's Website



MY EMPIRE BY KAVEH AKBAR



My empire made me

happy because it was an empire

and mine.


I was too stupid to rage at anything.


Babies cried at birth, it was said,

because the devil pricked them as introduction

to knowledge.


I sat fingering my gilded frame, counting

grievances like toes:


here my mother, here my ring,

here my sex, and here my king.


All still there. Wrath is the desire

to repay what you've suffered.


Kneeling on coins

before the minor deity in the mirror.

Clueless as a pearl.


That the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering

but to experience it seems—can I say this?—

a waste?


My empire made me happy

so I loved, easily, its citizens—such loving

a kind of birth, an introduction to pain.



MY EMPIRE continued



Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it.


The new missiles can detect a fly's heartbeat

atop a pile of rubble from 6,000 miles away.

That flies have hearts, 104 cells big, that beat.


And because of this knowing:

a pile of rubble.


The prophets came to participate in suffering

as if to an amusement park, which makes

our suffering the main attraction.


In our brochure:

a father's grief over this dead father,

the thorn broken off in a hand.


My empire made me happy

because it was an empire, cruel,


and the suffering wasn't my own.







SOURCE: Pilgrim Bell: Poems, poetry collection by Kaveh Akbar, Graywolf Press, Minnesota, USA, 2021.