Poem of the Week: Sholeh Wolpé

See Them Coming

Here come the octopi of war

tentacles wielding guns, missiles

holy books and colorful flags.

Don’t fill your pens with their ink.

Write with your fingernails, scratch

light upon these darkened days.

-Sholeh Wolpé

From The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press 2004). Used by permission.

Sholeh Wolpé is the author of Rooftops of Tehran, The Scar Saloon, and Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad for which she was awarded the Lois Roth Translation Prize in 2010. Sholeh is the associate editor of Tablet & Pen: Literary Landscapes from the Modern Middle East edited by Reza Aslan (Norton), the guest editor of Atlanta Review (2010 Iran issue) and the poetry editor of the Levantine Review, an online journal about the Middle East. Her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide, and have been translated into several languages. Sholeh was born in Iran and presently lives in Los Angeles.

Wolpé appeared on the panel We Are All Iran: a Group Reading by Iranian-American Poets during Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness 2010.

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Poems Against the Regime at Foreign Policy In Focus

Check out Poems Against the Regime at Foreign Policy In Focus.

Iranian American Poets Persis M. Karim, Sholeh Wolpe and Roger Sedarat have poems up at the Foreign Policy in Focus website, edited by Split This Rock co-director, Melissa Tuckey.

Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) is a "Think Tank Without Walls" connecting the research and action of more than 600 scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global partner. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.