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Excerpt from Donkey Days

But will there really be a revolution after the night of revolution // and will it belong to our daughters if it comes

  • Athena Farrokhzad
  • Fall 2022
Art by Osheen Siva
  • Poem
  • Violence

Donkey Days by Athena Farrokhzad was published by Albert Bonniers förlag in 2022.

Translation from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida


14.

What a fate, my aunt whispers on the phone
Her voice broken by four unprecedented decades
Twice, we have sent her
embalmed children on planes across the continent
How much, I ask the funeral director
As if we had hired him for any shipment he replies:
It depends on the weight of the deceased
Khale, how do you manage to turn night into day
This glacier will destroy me
and they did not even rest in my womb
Every dawn I weep in the armpit of my beloved
Tell me again, the fable of how the impossible
simply takes a bit longer

43.

One day, my aunt vows, the flames will find even those 
for whom a life is worth less than donkey dung 
Until then we will leap over the fires and shout
that the red is ours, that the fire can keep the yellow
We will gallop through the streets, cry like crows from the rooftops
that God is great and greater than God is the wrath when we gather
And to those who lick their wounds in cover of darkness
we will say that no salve can cure
a rot that has entered the blood

82.

There are people you have never met
who love you, I say to my daughter, she understands:
Like papa loves his team and like I love a mermaid
I forbid my beloved to answer when the phone rings
If someone is dead, I don’t want to know 
My aunt’s cries to the heavens, who will remember how magnificent she was
All the burdens she bore and all the catastrophes she faced
The braid of childhood in a drawer like a moth-eaten reminder
She never stops wearing black, her final sorrow never comes
We are trapped in a place between earth and hell, she says
beneath a film of smog, we beat our backs bloody with chains
stab each other in the thigh with pitchforks
Pas kei miaee, she cries on the phone, you are my first daughter
I’ll be there soon, I lie, who knows
how tomorrow will hold me

88.

One day we will return
and when our sorrows over the life we were robbed of meet
something horrible will fall apart
I hate everything I did that estranged me from them
I whimper and slap myself, such meaningless rioting
If it had at least meant something to someone else or me
The most violent quality of repression, my beloved says
is its randomness, holds my hands as they make their way to the throat
Don’t you remember what your aunt said, that one day
our daughters will toast their cousins on revolution square
But will there really be a revolution after the night of revolution
and will it belong to our daughters if it comes
and are those really our daughters slumbering there in bed
and what kind of tombstone will we return to


  • Donkey Days family Iran Mahsa Jina Amini prayer revolution

Athena Farrokhzad

Athena Farrokhzad was born in 1983 and lives in Stockholm. She is a poet, literary critic, translator, playwright, and teacher of creative writing. Her book White Blight is out in the US, in Jennifer Hayashida's translation.

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