Before the Earth

‘Before the Earth’

Night

had pushed its cold hands

into the pockets of darkness,

and the street,

like a nameless gravestone,

lay breathless beneath a young man’s body.

His mother came;

not with wailing,

not with a cry,

with that silence

that only mothers

know

when the world ends.

She sat beside her son,

touched his forehead,

as though still

wanting to see

whether the fevers of his childhood

had gone down.

The wind

passed through the city’s bones,

the lamps

had closed their weary eyes,

and the sky

had not a single star

to bear witness.

The mother

drew aside the veil of night,

spread her own body

over the cold of the ground,

and without saying a word

stood between the earth

and her son.

Neither the earth had the right

to take him first,

nor the cold

the right

to touch his name.

In that moment,

a mother’s embrace

was no longer an embrace;

it was the homeland’s final border,

the final roof of the homeless,

the last light

before the dark.

And the son,

who once

with his first cry

had lit the house,

now,

in silence,

was waking the entire city.

The mother bent down

and softly said:

Sleep, my son,

this time

I will stay awake in your place,

until morning,

with death.

S. Rouzbeh