Across the southern sea, the eucalyptus stands in quiet light,
unmoved by the burning thorns of my distant province.
The evening falls here with gentle, careless mercy;
no shadow falls across the doorstep,
no knock shatters the fragile glass of sleep.
I breathe the cool, untroubled air of this vast island,
and the air tastes of ash, of stolen bread, of debt.
On the glowing screen, Tehran is bleeding in the dark.
The alleys of my youth are choked with tear gas and stone,
where young voices break like pomegranate blossoms against the wall,
demanding dawn from a sky determined to stay blind.
I watch them run through the smoke of Azadi,
while behind me, the Pacific whispers its indifferent lullaby.
How strange is the sanctuary of the exile—
to be delivered from the storm only to drown in the silence.
I am safe beneath this foreign constellation,
yet every undisturbed morning feels like a betrayal,
and every quiet cup of tea, a quiet crime.
The bird that fled the burning forest
did not save its wings;
it only carried the fire across the ocean
to burn within an uninjured chest.
O land of dried riverbeds and defiant eyes,
forgive the one who sleeps under unbroken windows,
whose only wound is the luxury of watching,
whose only prayer is a mirror covered in shame,
waiting for the spring that he did not bleed to bring.
Publisher’s Note: Ethnographic Media Group
At Ethnographic Media Group, our mission is to illuminate the quiet, lived realities of cross-cultural movement—the unseen thresholds where geography, heritage, and modern displacement intersect. It is with profound respect that we present the work of Reza Gharib.
Gharib’s poetry speaks from the acute tension of contemporary exile. Writing from the periphery of regional Queensland, his verses capture the psychological reality of life after departure: the disquiet of watching ancestral upheaval from an ocean away, the crushing opacity of immigration bureaucracy, and the bittersweet sanctuary of a quiet foreign city. His work resists easy sentimentality, offering instead an unvarnished examination of survivor’s guilt, professional displacement, and the fragile preservation of memory in the face of forced silence.
By joining classical Persian lyrical sensibilities with modern free verse, Gharib provides a vital testament to the Iranian diaspora’s enduring voice. This collection is not merely an accounting of loss, but an act of cultural persistence—reminding us that while physical borders can sever a writer from their soil, the interior landscape of language and truth remains unbroken.
