Mother: Calm in the Heart of the Typhoon (Storm)
Mother was the exhaustion of a lifetime,
a woman who carried suffering to her final breath
and, at last, found rest—
just as she witnessed the beginning of the dictator’s fall.
Believing in the death of a loved one is hard,
especially when it is your mother.
Yet this is life itself—
life in all its cruelty and honesty.
My friends did not leave me alone,
but I ran from them
and took refuge in my hidden room,
a place suspended between silence
and the assault of thought.
Like kindling on fire—
neither burning out, nor going cold.
Like a jalboot trapped among waves,
slowly sinking.
Like a deckhand whose dhow has gone under,
caught in the cold, furious sea.
Like a wave with no shore to lean on,
condemned to return, again and again, unprotected.
But not like those
who do not even know where their loved ones are buried;
not like those
who learned the news from a dry headline;
not like those
who cried in secret corners of their homes,
afraid the enemy might sense
that they had loved,
that they had a heart.
Mother,
in her own silence and tenderness,
announced her death
with calm—
without spectacle,
without claim.
And yet, despite everything,
like a wave
I found myself trapped
among raging waters.
You know…
the sound of the damam drum and shoruh chant
is caught inside me.
My mother’s voice singing:
“I reached the head of Bast-e Choghadeh…”
I wept deeply—
a weeping that never passed my throat,
but stayed lodged in my chest.
I am burning,
set alight from within.
Not flame—
memory.
I am remembering…
Her departure
was like a soldier
who had lost his trench.
He thought himself unprotected,
yet he became
a shelter for others
so that they would not remain exposed.
She was a refuge for her companions
in the harshest of times,
when refuge itself
was the rarest thing in the world.
When I entered,
she lay in a place
like a bird
asleep in mid-flight.
But she had left her wings behind
as a gift
for us.
Her state—
half-open eyes
that had always been watchful;
a warm face,
yet a kind heart
that had beaten for freedom and equality
had come to rest.
But no—
it had not stopped;
it had become a cry,
silent;
a presence
within stillness.
There was no pain on her face.
She had offered calm—
a calm
that shamed pain itself,
and silenced
even the most violent waves of the sea.
I do not know
what she was thinking
in those final moments of life,
but I know this:
her entire effort
was to spare us sorrow,
to pretend that all was well,
so that we would not
break.
Rather,
so that we might turn grief
into thought.
In her final moments,
she tried to soften her expression
so that when we came to see her
she could gift us calm—
lest we fall apart
and forget the beauty of life.
But the truth is this:
when I saw her,
it was not calm
that reached me;
she gave me
the gift of being alive again.
And with a smile
still suspended in the air,
she seemed to say:
“I witnessed the beginning of the dictator’s fall—
and you
will celebrate his collapse.”
Then read aloud,
in the fields of the young,
keep our memory alive, comrades,
for in the darkness of night,
beneath the savage wings of the blood-drinking bat,
we planted
this jewel of a bright dawn.
(Mohammad Zahri)
Naser Kamali
12 January 2026