The Stone Throwers

What triggered the memory?
Walking down Fifth Avenue?
The elegant ladies with their shopping bags?
The tourists walking too slowly?
The hustlers peddlers harassing selling trinkets or dollars?
Foreigners definitely. Refugees? Middle Eastern?
Suddenly, I’m back in Tehran—
lost in a strange city
asking a woman for directions, or news,
there were rumors of war around Israel.

Most Women in Iran live lives as proscribed
as the cloaks that engulfed them
but this woman wasn’t–—
this breath-takingly beautiful woman
this blatantly beautiful woman
this flamboyantly beautiful woman
clinging to her body
bold lips, shaded bright eyes
the soft, cream contours of her breasts
not hidden but recalled all these years later.
A shimmering goddess, on her way somewhere,
in a hurry; our conversation was brief.

As she swept on her way, I remarked to my companion,
if she ventured into the market
she would be stoned
(we had met some girls
who had been stoned
for wearing shorts)

Where is she now?
(She? Or her daughters?)
Shrouded in a chador?
Forbidden to show off her figure, her good looks
forbidden to have the pleasure of men looking at her
forbidden to have the pleasure of looking at men
forbidden the pleasure of a little excitement
forbidden the pleasure of taking up space
yet we preferred those places
where a self confident women would get stoned
we were in search of the exotic, the exciting, the danger
and loved to wander the back streets, the markets
with their interesting smells, the spices, the rugs,
the exotic jackets and hats, the hand crafted furnishings,
those places shaded from the sun, dark, mysterious,
where women did not venture
and if they did, were hidden in black
taking up as little space as possible
we expecting that soon
all this would be swept away by an expanding
Americana, its suburbs stretching across Long Island,
across Europe, through Asia and on a Los Angeles,
what a dull future we feared
and wanted to experience it all
before it disappeared.

That may happen one day.
Meanwhile in most places (even here)
the world belongs to the stone throwers.