To Neda - A poem by Michael Burton

A year ago there was an uprising in Iran against an unjust government and a woman named Neda was killed. This poem is for the first anniversary of her death.

 

A year ago there was an uprising in Iran against an unjust government and a woman named Neda was killed. The powers that killed Neda in Iran are enemies of life but there are also similar powers in our part of the world who are just as opposed to life. They wish to gain popularity for the idea of a war against Iran. They will use the memory of Neda, as someone who has become a symbol of the struggle against the present government there, to do something that Neda herself could not possibly have wanted - to wage war on her people - something that would probably strengthen the present regime and maybe even keep it in power or put in place something just as bad. That is why I’ve written this poem.

We approach the anniversary of the death of Neda this week, and the Iranian regime is practising all kinds of oppressive measures to keep any sort of people’s uprising down. May this poem help the powers of love – in that country and with us – to be stronger than those of death.

A superb video about Neda by British film-maker Antony Thomas, just released on 14th June and containing interviews with her family and much else, can be seen at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F48SinuEHIk&feature=player_embedded
If you watch it you will see how many of the ideas of the poem came from there.





TO NEDA
on the first anniversary of your death, June 20th 2009

They cannot bear beauty.
They know its power one day
will bring them down,
and therefore they wage war against it
every chance they get.

In every country
young men and women aspire towards the sacred dream of freedom.
What freedom is
is felt and only dimly known.
Often those who seek it
get things wrong, all wrong.
But still it draws them.
The idea of freedom
draws them on.

Neda – it could have been another girl;
it could have been one of many hundreds of thousands of girls –
but it was you.
You are the one we watch.
We sit there safely in our homes,
far from the shouting and the shots,
and watch your heart’s blood streaming out upon the ground.
No fear is in your eyes,
no pain.
It is as if you are aware that we are watching.
We hear your friend call,
    “Neda, please!
    Stay with us, Neda!
    Do not go!”
But there was nothing you could do, and it was time to go.

A year has passed since then; there’s thousands in the world
who think of you.
I like to look at all that’s happened not just from an Iranian point of view.
For you are not just an Iranian woman; you are a woman, Neda, of our time.
The bullet that struck you
is found in other countries too.
There in your country they took Allah, the compassionate and merciful,
and turned him into a beast of vengeance
that no normal young woman with a lust for life could ever love.
And they’ve done this
with my God too.
Some of them say
they’d like to make your people suffer – like to bomb and kill them –
giving no reason other than that we should be afraid of them.
Are they who say this any different from your murderers?
Both deal in fear, having little else to offer,
not knowing how perfect love casts out all fear.

Ah, Neda, you and I and many others round the world
are lovers of a God of Love,
while those who talk of hate and fear are vassals of a twisted thing
of malice and possessiveness,
so very far
from what is in our hearts –
the God that we feel close to
every time we love.

Neda, how can you be killed?
You are not a woman, you are a force of humanity.
You are not a woman, you are the voice of our humanity.
You are that in all of us
which will not bow before injustice
and will resist oppression
till its inevitable end.
Neda – you the power in us
that, in the name of love,
will rise up and resist.

You lay there, Neda, at your hasty funeral,
so beautiful,
as beautiful as you had been in life.
You are not dead.
It is the ones whose way of thought has run its course
who now are dead.
And, seeing you, I have this premonition
of the death of what must die.
The old order
has been given a little time upon the earth,
but you and ones to come like you shall wrench from them the world.
Your beauty, Neda, that the crumbling order fears,
shall save the world.

Michael Hedley Burton