Poems

You’re a Stranger

Notes

It took us a while to work out that this poem is written from the perspective of a woman in her grave addressing a man passing her by. The first crucial change was from 'passing by' to 'passing me by'. We talked a lot about how to render that final image: gravestones in Iran are flat, whereas here Christian graves are usually upright.

In the original Farsi, none of these poems has a title. Because of the way our website is set up, we've had to use the first line as the title for each of them.

Sarah Maguire, Workshop Facilitator