Ghazal Games. Roger Sedarat

       The Beard

       for Marlene Clark

      Now all else has failed; I’m growing my beard.

      Look for the man I was behind my beard.

      No Tehran taxis stop for the mullah,

      Drivers spitting at each passerby’s beard.

      “I can’t kiss you anymore,” said his wife.

      “It’s not really you, it’s . . . that ugly beard.”

      Excerpt from the terrorist’s instructions:

      “Use Clorox bleach to kill germs and dye beard.”

      To make the Ayatollah’s effigy,

      We toilet-papered a white two-ply beard.

      “There’s Daddy!” screamed my son, the president

      Of Iran’s beard the same length as my beard.

      The prisoner pieced together poetry

      With curlicues he plucked from his gray beard.

      After the fatwa against the poet,

      The CIA loaned him their best spy beard.

      Dear writer of new Persian poetry,

      Need an apt metonym for “man”? Try “beard.”

      “Hey, Khomeini!” my aunt Shirin exclaimed,

      Fake-cutting my facial hair. “Good-bye beard!”

      Five-letter word for overgrown shadow

      Yet to be cast upon soldier boy: _______.

      The poet, in the last line of “The Beard,”

      When asked to state his name, just writes: “I, beard.”