3 poems by Poet in Residence Mansour Noorbakhsh

How Come? 
After, "Prayer For Sunset" by Leonard Cohen. 

Today could still be a good day. 
Believe in occasional love.

A hunter, a friend of mine, 
spent a whole night atop a tree coaxing a bear 
that followed the smell of burnt honey to its death.

“How come?” I asked him. 
“Leave a door open for imagination. 
A chance to love.”

“Bear symbolizes rebirth 
because of its hibernation 
and re-emergence.” He answered. 

Weapons run out like death itself. 
Prayers come to back up the shortage. 
What does not end is the disturbed sleeps 
of explosions.

There is a market that trades imaginations for weapons. 
Where the imagination of love is sacrificed 
by the myth of rebirth.
Rebirth, a used excuse to justify wars.






What If
	After, The Secret Sits by Robert Frost

We don’t live on the earth.
We live on a geopolitical map, alas.
Broken into pieces,
like chairs for Musical Chairs.
There are no seats for us.

We don’t dance to the music.
We just nervously trembling, 
waiting for our moment to get “Out”.

What if we write to each other
the words that have never uttered.
The forbidden words
that are banished to holy vintages.

We have never lived for each other, alas.






Urgent Need

Let’s breathe each other 
instead of abusing us as a charity.
I don’t feel ashamed to advertise it. 

I need to breathe. 
We all need to breathe. 
Please share it 
as you share with your friends that 
someone urgently needs "blood of this or that group". 

Let all know that 
I need "a breath of all types", urgently.

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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.

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