Poem of the Week

Kaveh Akbar was born in Tehran and is the author of the poetry collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James, 2018). A doctoral student at Florida State University, he lives in Tallahassee.

Do You Speak Persian?

by Kaveh Akbar

Some days we can see Venus in midafternoon. Then at night,
    stars
separated by billions of miles, light traveling years

to die in the back of an eye.


Is there a vocabulary for this—one to make dailiness amplify
and not diminish wonder?


I have been so careless with the words I already have.


I don’t remember how to say home
in my first language, or lonely, or light.
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