Maryam Ala Amjadi

Maryam Ala Amjadi Poems

Maryam Ala Amjadi Biography

Maryam Ala Amjadi, born in 1984 in Tehran, is a young poet, translator and essayist who has spent the impressionable years of her childhood in India. Her first book of poems Me, I and Myself was published by TehranSeda Publications in 2003. Ala Amjadi who writes in English was the winner of the Silver Medal in the 14th National Persian Literature Olympiad (2001) and was awarded Honorary Fellowship in Creative Writing by the International Writers Program (IWP) at University of Iowa, U.S.A. (Fall 2008) . She has also won the Second Prize (on Gender issues in Translation) in the A.K. Ramanujan National Paper Reading Competition, University of Baroda, India (January 2009) and is also the translator of the American poet, Raymond Carver's poetry in a collection entitled, Fear of Arriving Early (Aknoon Publications, Tehran 2009) . A Member of the Young Scholars Club in Tehran and World Poets Society (W.P.S) , she has also previously worked as a Persian-English News Interpreter at the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) . She has an M.A. in English Literature from University of Pune. Ala Amjadi’s second book of poems Gypsy Bullets was published by Prafullata Publications (India) in January 2010. Her poems have been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Italian and Romanian. In September 2011, she won the 'Young Generation Poet' Award in the 1st International Poetry Festival in Yinchuan, China. Presently, she is a writer for the Tehran Times Daily and writes the 'Lifestyle' page every Sunday.)

The Best Poem Of Maryam Ala Amjadi

Underneath

for Lubna al-Hussein

The butterflies of my headscarf
are pilgrim worms that have always crawled up
the laddered gloom of my vocal cords.

And by the strident testimony of my heels
the life I walk is half dead on the blindness of scales
while the immature conquerors of our alien triangles
feed on the generous familiarity of our circles.

Tell me,
How many shrouds of laughter and wrath should we stitch
so the trampled body of this silence is never vertical
again?

The flowers of our drowsy dresses no longer wish to await
a mating wind that scatters motherless dreams
on the dizzy denial of an earth
that can offer equal warmth only to horizontal feet
and avenge the uneven passion of the pair that
treads on her.

Skirts unite the stupor of legs for
trousers to divide and rule.

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