Elahe Rahroniya (Noshad)

Poem-Story collection

Read one poem-Story from this collection:

Waking up in the shape of butterfly

From the collection of poem-stories “ The Sound of Laughs” By Elahe Rahroniya

To the girls of Revolution Street

I don’t know if it was a street or a crossroad. It was so crowded that it was hard to see around. The waves of color came from the sides so massively and densely that you had to push them apart with both hands to cross over. I remembered passing of the colorful groups of fish in the warm waters. The butterflies came from every side in scores. The clusters of yellow, pink, orange and purple butterflies were suspended in the space instead of air, as if it was a butterflies cooking ceremony. As if there were plenty of big pots full of butterflies on the roofs of every house and they are cooked and sent up in to the air again and again.

It was hard to walk, so I thought that flying is better. I closed my legs and opened my wings and followed the butterflies. You with a hand in your pocket were standing on the other side of the square. Tall, robustly boasting of your thick chest and asking me to come to you by shaking your head. I reached you, sat on your shoulder like the parrot of my neighbor which sat on his shoulder

‘’Hungry? ‘’ you asked.
‘’ Hungry and thirsty both,” I answered. “ Wine or nectar?” you asked.
“ Both, if no bother,” I answered.

You smiled offering your lips to me as in a proposal and I drank both wine and nectar to be full. When night came, you put me in your breast pocket, climbed up a big tree and we slept on a wide branch under the moonlight.
In the morning when we woke up, there was nothing, no city, no butterfly, nothing. It was just you, a tree, an endless desert and I. We both scared, looked at the tree, at least, she was older than you and me and knew unwritten secrets better than us. But the tree’s silence and crooked neck told us that our dice was loaded on an endless road.

We got on the way, your foot on the ground and mine in the air, we went and went and became thirstier and thirstier. Your lips were dried of thirst and there was no wine and nectar. More hope on the way than to stay, so we continued even though there was no life in our tired bodies. Until you fell down and I fluttered over your exhausted and hefty body, while that large and large and large repetitive question was passing between my hands and yours like day and night. “ Where have the butterflies gone? And why?” and I was banging my body at your shoulders to stop you from falling down into sleeping death.

14 centuries passed and I still flutter over your shoulders hoping that you wake up again removing heavy dust on your cloths little by little with my tiny wings…
Until someday a butterfly fell on

the earth from a cloud, and one more and one more…and a rain of butterflies started. And your body became covered with butterflies. We all together went to the their hidden underground shelter, each of us found a petal or leaf to carry drops of dew and poured them one by one in your dried mouth to wake you up. We passed 40 years coming and going, 40 times we died and revived searching dew, searching 40 seas 40 mountains and 40 fields until at the end of 40t h year you burst out laughing and a bubbling fountain of wine and nectar spouted from your white teeth. The butterflies gathered under that sweet shower and I, who was deeply exhausted,

took my pillow out of your breast pocket , laid it down on your shoulder calmly and fell to sleep.

Elahe Rahroniya 26 February 2018