Pandemic vs Utopia 

The cracked eggshell of
your certainty spills Viruses,
excuse me Plato
we need social distancing and
disinfecting the Forms and Ideas
to pass the faith over.

The destiny of humankind, now, puzzled,
loses the intensity of an entire summer 
while people must keep their distances 
but flowers are blooming
and fruits are ripening.

Let’s leave Utopia to animals
and take refuge to our loneliness,
groping blindly,
by feeling the limbs of
dissected mirages,
the inexorable laws.

Still what if coincidentally
we touch the palm of a 
dissected-admirable-intuition,  
and an unfocused grief appears
among the feverish questions?
perhaps about the common weal.

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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.