Before the Earth
S. Rouzbeh
۱۷ تیر ۱۴۰۵

A mother shelters her son’s body from the cold ground and keeps watch with death until morning.

‘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

Source: https://srouzbeh.com/en/posts/archive-1688db87-0a66-0bb3-b702-9151959301bc
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