The tyrant [1] opened the book:
“The heavens turn on the path of justice.
Rejoice that the tyrant won’t find the way home.” [2]
He forgot to look in the mirror
of prophecy
The Justice [3]
struck down by heaven
was cast upon the rocks
Puppet-president
Distinguished member
of Death Delegation
The Justice
lost his way home
to prison-land
never to be judged
by the living
The divination—
a vindication of the oppressed
Hearken, Butcher of Tehran, [4]
to the mouthpiece of the divine—
your name etched on gallows
soaked in blood
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This poem was written in response to Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash on May 19, 2024, on his way back from a meeting with his Azerbaijani counterpart Ilham Aliyev.
[2] The fourteenth-century Iranian poet Hafez is nicknamed “the mouthpiece of the divine.” Iranians perform divinations with his book of ghazals. In a meeting with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in January 2024, Ebrahim Raisi opened the Divan of Hafez and read out these lines as divination. Here is the original Persian of the above lines:
دور فلکی یکسره بر منهج عدل است/ خوش باش که ظالم نبرد راه به منزل
[3] Before his presidency, Raisi held several positions in Iran’s Judiciary and was part of the infamous “Death Committee” that handed out thousands of death sentences to political prisoners.
[4] Raisi’s nickname
