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This poem is dedicated to Bakhtash Abtin, a political prisoner, poet, documentary and filmmaker who died in custody on the 8th of January 2022.

January 17, 2022 IN WIP
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A Poem Dedicated to Bakhtash Abtin

by Mammad Aidani
This poem is dedicated to Bakhtash Abtin, a political prisoner, poet, documentary and filmmaker who died in custody on the 8th of January 2022. Abtin was a board member of the Iranian Writers’ Association. A group of political prisoners in Iran and the Iranian Writers Association said: “the death of Abtin is part of the Iranian regime’s systematic killing of imprisoned dissidents”.
From this window,
I see
A tree
The empty street
The closed doors
The walls.
Thinking of my desolated city,
destroyed in a futile war
Years of exile
Tragedy after tragedy
Thinking
Thinking
Of my homeland
devastated by dictators
Remembering
Things
Gazing at the horizon in the sky
I go far away
So far away.
I fix my thoughts
on a place called Evin prison
A slaughterhouse built to torture and execute
Evin, your name haunts us every day.
I see the poet in chains
thinking of him and thousands of prisoners
tortured,
executed,
I see the poet with his notebook in hand
thinking of him and his inmates uttering liberating words
Azadi! Azadi!
Freedom! Freedom!
fighting oppression
censorship.
I know their voices
United together,
they sing the song of freedom in captivity
with conviction saying NO to their oppressors.
And the evil willed torturers are watching him suffering
wishing him and his friends to vanish and die
wishing to eliminate their names from the memories of people
The poet in chains, in the torture chamber
will never die.
The noble minds
will always be alive
Their good thoughts,
Acts,
Deeds,
will keep flourishing and live with their people
From this window
I think
I remember
I remember
Your names
From this window,
I look into the far distance.
From this window,
I cry for my sad, desolated homeland.
From this window,
I think of the poet in chain
Crying
Adalat va Azadi!
Justice and freedom.

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People say that (writers) are pretty powerless: we don’t have an army, we don’t have a bureaucracy. But if that were true, then why would writers be arrested?... Because the spoken word is powerful.

— John Ralston Saul on the work of PEN International