Labor Day | Rira Abbasi
Perhaps today the wage of my veins will be a riot of light in your body.
Translated from Farsi by Maryam Ala Amjadi
by Rira Abbasi
From the stench of all rotten names
From the norms of my body
From the sweat drops drowned in my veins in an infinite mine,
My body is a daily worker whose account is lost every night in your days
Perhaps today the wage of my veins will be a riot of light in your body.
The wage of my body is bent
and before I stand up from all these useless hands to another,
lay my pay between my noble brassiere
I am proud of the honor of my work!
Go on now, couple up your shoes
and never remember me once you walk out this door.
In the depth of Sunday sunsets in May,
whether you recall or not,
I am a pure worker,
a pure worker am I.
*Labor Day is internationally celebrated on May 1 in most countries.
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Rira Abbasi was born in 1962 in Khorramabad, Iran. Acclaimed as Iran’s Woman Poet Laureate and the winner of the Parvin Etesami Poetry Award (2005), Abbasi is a member of Iran’s Writers Association and founder and director of the biennial International Peace Poetry Festival in Tehran. Her works include Valentine, the White Sheep (2014), a bold collection of love poems entitled Who Loves You More Discreetly? (2002), and No More Guns for this Lor Woman (2001). Abbasi edited and introduced the first anthology of Iranian Peace Poetry in 2002 and received of the Prince Claus Award at the International Poetry Festival of Medellin in 2011. In 2014, Abbasi’s efforts led to the publication of Iran’s first multilingual anthology of poetry, Peace, the Poetry of Life. Her work has been anthologized and translated into a number of languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Romanian, Kurdish, Chinese, and Hindi.
Maryam Ala Amjadi is an Iranian poet, translator and essayist who has spent the impressionable years of her childhood in India and writes poetry in English. She is the author of two poetry collections and the translator of a selection of poems by Raymond Carver. She received the ‘Young Generation Poet’ Award in the first International Poetry Festival in Yinchuan, China (Sept 2011) and was awarded Honorary Fellowship in Creative Writing by the International Writers Program (IWP) at University of Iowa, U.S.A. (Fall 2008). She was also the winner of the Silver Medal in the 14th National Persian Literature Olympiad (2001). Ala Amjadi has worked as a Farsi-to-English news translator at the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) and was previously a writer for the Tehran Times Daily, where she founded and wrote a weekly page in English dedicated to Iranian culture and society. Presently, she is an editor at Hysteria, a periodical of critical feminisms and a PhD fellow in Text and Event in Early Modern Europe (TEEME) at the Universities of Kent and Porto. Ala Amjadi’s poems have been translated into Arabic, Albanian, Chinese, Hindi, Italian and Romanian.