N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a :
R e p o r t 2 0 1 3
: S p e c i a l E d i t i o n
L o n g P o e m M a s t e r p i e c e s o f
t h e P o s t b e a t
s
ALI ZARRIN
Made You Mine America
America
in the
poems of Walt Whitman
Langston Hughes
Allen
Ginsberg
the songs
of Woody Guthrie
and Joan
Baez
I made
you mine
rushing
to you at night and daybreak
by air
and water––
on the
land
getting a
social security number
in the
year nineteen hundred seventy
working
the grave yard shift for ITT
a
teenager four levels below the ground
a cashier
in a three by eight booth
under the
Denver Hilton Hotel
sheltering
derelicts
who slept
on beds of cardboard and newspaper
pillows
of shoes
my young
body luring
late
night prostitutes and transvestites
hip to my
accent
the
midnight thief pouring mace in my eyes
escaping
up the long ramp
passing
through barbed wires
and
waiting for hours in the INS lobbies
facing
grouchy secretaries
overwhelmed
by the languages
they
can't speak
and accents
they can't enjoy
becoming
naturalized
in the
year of bicentennial celebration
the
migration of my parents
to your
welfare state
of
millions living in tenement housing
reeking
with the smell of urine and cheap liquor
traveling
the US of A
as large
as Whitman's green mind, white beard, and red heart
from the
Deadman's Pass rest area
on the
old Oregon Trail
to the
Scenic Overlook at the Mason-Dixon line, Maryland
from
White Spot––Albuquerque
to Cafe
Rose––Arlington
from
Gate's Rubber Factory––Denver
to AC
Rochester––Flint
from
Boulder High School
to the
University of Washington
from
Mountain Home––Idaho
to
Rockford--Illinois
as large
as Mark Twain's laughter and irony
teardrop
by teardrop
from
YMCA's casket-sized single rooms
in
Brooklyn
Chicago
San
Francisco
to
Denver's Republic Hotel
corner of
15th and California
the home
of broken old men and women
subsisting
on three hundred sixty four dollars
social
security checks
waiting
on Denver oilmen in the Petroleum Club
Nights of
Jazz at El Chapultepec
the
Larimer of the past
where
Arapahoes lived in their tepees
and now
sleep on the sidewalks
with
battered lips and broken heads
going
door to door on Madison Ave, Seattle
selling
death insurance for American National
servicing
houses of bare minimum––
a TV and
a couch
drunken
men and women
lonely
ailing old African women making quilts
selling
each for fifty dollars
marrying
a teacher
a third
generation auto worker
whose
parents shared crops in Caraway, Arkansas
fathering
two tender boys
born in
America
with
their blue and brown eyes
half
origins of Asiatic Caucasianness
substituting
for teachers
babysitting
bored Middle School children
driving
them home in a school bus
teaching
your youth to write English
and speak
Persian
loving
your children
daughters
sons
mothers
fathers
grandmothers
grandfathers
hating
your aggression
you
aligned yourself with the worst of my kind
exiled my
George Washington––
Dr.
Mohammad Mosaddeq
helped
Saddam bomb my birthplace
destroy
the school of my childhood
his
soldiers swarming the hills of Charzebar
where as
a child I hunted with my grandfather
sold arms
to warmongers
who waged
battles on grounds
that my
great-grandfather made fifteen pilgrimages
on foot
to Karbala
now I lay
claim to your Bill of Rights
and
Declaration of Independence.
I came to
you
not a
prince who had lost his future throne
not a
thief
finding a
cover in the multitude of your metropolis
hiding
behind your volumes of law
not a
merchant
dreaming
of exploiting your open markets
not a
smuggler seeking riches overnight
but a
green-horn seventeen year-old
with four
hundred dollars
after dad
sold his prized Breda
and mom
some of her wedding jewelry
with a
suitcase of clothes and books––
Ferdowsi
Khayyam
Hafez
Baba
Taher
Rumi
Shakespeare
Nima
Foruq
and a
small Koran––
my
grandmother's gift
not to
conquer Wall Street
Broadway
or
Hollywood
I came to
you
to study
to learn
and I
learned you can't deny me parenthood
I lost my
grand-parents
while
roaming your streets
traveling
across your vastness
you can't
turn me down
I gave
you my youth
walking
and driving Colfax nights long
I came
with hate
but now I
love you
America
[Note by
Ali Zarrin: I wrote this poem in the early 1990s. Initially, I meant to dedicate it to Allen Ginsberg. I actually presented it to him in
person in the summer of 1994 at Naropa in Boulder. I still treasure a draft of this poem with Allen’s remarks
in his handwriting. He had
previously done the same to many of my poems. However, this poem was already accepted for publication in a
special edition of the Literary Review dedicated to the Persian
Literature of the Iranian Diaspora (1996)
and I considered the poem finished.
In 1999, it was published in Identity
Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American (Penguin
Press) and in 2001 as a Prologue to Exiled
Memories (Temple University Press,
2001. It was also published as a
chapbook in 2006 by Alien Books.
It has also appeared in the following publications: Neveshta,
International Literary Journal published
in Tehran, Iranian.com and Other Voices Poetry in the USA, and etc. Used by
permission of the author.]
Ali Zarrin is a bilingual Iranian-American poet who was born in Kermanshah and immigrated to the USA in 1970. He received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington and is the author of 12 books of poetry and literary criticism in English and Persian.