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Hair in the game…
Raymond Nat Turner, BAR poet-in-residence
20 Sep 2023
🖨️ Print Article
Hair in the game…
Tehran students in 1971. (Photo: Kaveh Farrokh/foreignpolicy.com)

                                                                                           Hair in the game…

Heard it… Heard it…Heard it …

Rhythms of swishing

scissors shearing sable curls; wavy brown manes;

straight tresses salt and pepper; Shearing locks of

sundry shades of grey and white.

Harmonizing shouts of “Death To The Dictator!”

morph from cries for

Equal rights and explode in red sea streets…

Iranians are rising—again! Rising in

Movements…Maybe a flashback? 1909?

Maybe a Mosaddegh moment? Maybe more?

Maybe this is it? Maybe the next one?

Some of us remember Iranian demonstrations—

circa late 70s. Brilliant/militant feats of flesh and

Blood engineering…

Young and strong. Marching all night long—

thru twists and turns—

Playing cat and mouse, in and out, cul-de-sac traps

set by San Francisco’s political police. Truncheoned

thugs whose hand-eye coordination with the Shah’s

SAVAK intelligence tentacles reached out from icy fog

Some of us remember marchers’ names: Firouz, Mansour,

Mahdi, Azad…

Remember that they spoke English—Yet read the Germans

in Farsi.

Some of us remember standing in solidarity

as the peacock throne imploded— collapsed —

Under weight of street heat/fire of millions of

Feet in the street.

Some of us remember rapture of comrades and friends—

Rushing home, rejoicing—

Never to be heard from again…

We stand in solidarity today with women having hair in the

Game—Women marching through

Mushroom clouds of teargas; tsunamis of lead—red seas of

Death—Women resisting misogynist mullahs/murderous ‘morality’

Police…To topple theocratic thugs swaddled in silk robes of graft

Today we stand in heart/soul/spine solidarity with the Iranian

People:

Common mothers, daughters, sisters, wives of warehouse workers—

bus and truck drivers, train operators—fierce fighters—

again on the long, winding road of revolution…

lubricated by oil workers hurling themselves into the swelling

Resistance

And Mahsa Amini’s the Rock of Gibraltar bloodthirsty clerics

lifted

only

to

drop

on

Their own crimson-stained sandals and combat boots— Instructing

Us on how we must take our own Texas Taliban/Florida fundamentalists…on

© 2022. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.



Raymond Nat Turner is a NYC poet; BAR's Poet-in-Residence; and founder/co-leader of the jazz-poetry ensemble UpSurge!NYC. You can Vote for his work at: GoFundMe and PayPal.

Iran
Mahsa Amini

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