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After: Requiem by Anna Akhmatova

 I will never forget you
 I cannot
 although I know you will 
 not come back,
 and I will 
 not see you again.
  
 Where did you die?
 I don’t know.
 Hanged up in a prison
 or killed in a war?
  
 I never believed the news
 that said you committed 
 suicide, in the prison,
 or were killed in a clash
 in the street.
  
 But I know, 
 I knew that from the beginning,
 nothing is more bloodthirsty 
 than love.
  
 And more painful it is 
 is that it hurts in silence,
 while it burns the silence.
  
 And burns
 without having a chance to shout.
 And above all, it burns oblivion
 before burning anything else
 and still, it is the beginning.
  
 I will not reach out to the end.
 My end is in me,
 like the beginning.
  
 We reached behind bars
 that blocked us at the end of 
 a dark tunnel, but light
 could still flow through 
 to your eyes, and my heart.
  
 

  
Reciting
“After The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman”
  
 Spell your name 
 on the palm 
 of my hand
 
 
 as you spell it for 
 the blind or the deaf. 
  
 At the end of loneliness 
 at the end of silence 
 at the anonymous end  
 of incoherence. 
   
 I do not know what it means  
 to be a child 
 But I recognized you just 
 from the light you were carrying 
 in your hand in the silence
 of a twilight of our hoping. 
  
 Not from your voice 
 as there was no sound 
 from me 
 or from you.  

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Mansour Noorbakhsh writes and translates poems in both English and Farsi, his first language. He tries to be a voice for freedom, human rights and environment in his writings. He believes a dialog between people around the world is an essential need for developing a peaceful world, and poetry helps this dialog echoes the human rights. Currently he is featuring The Contemporary Canadian Poets in a weekly Persian radio program https://persianradio.net/. The poet’s bio and poems are translated into Farsi and read to the Persian-Canadian audiences. Both English (by the poets) and Farsi (by him) readings are on air. This is a project of his to build bridges between the Persian-Canadian communities by way of introducing them to contemporary Canadian poets. His book about the life and work of Sohrab Sepehri entitled, “Be Soragh e Man Agar Miaeed” (trans. “If you come to visit me”) is published in 1997 in Iran. And his English book length poem; “In Search of Shared Wishes” is published in 2017 in Canada. His English poems are published in “WordCity monthly” and “Infinite Passages” (anthology 2020 by The Ontario Poetry Society). He is a member of The Ontario Poetry Society and he is an Electrical Engineer, P.Eng. He lives with his wife, his daughter and his son in Toronto, Canada.