Barbari Bread

In the alleys where the tired dusk descends,

the women walk unveiled against the rifles,

their shadows lengthened by the martyr walls

where yesterday’s boys still whisper through the paint.

I have seen, from Delhi’s rain and Beirut’s ash,

how empires train the night to speak in orders,

yet always there is one old baker in Tehran

who passes bread beneath the shuttered curfew,

one student copying Hafez by candlelight

while drones circle like bad translations overhead.

History, comrades, is never merely written—

it is smuggled hand to hand through trembling cities,

through prisons where the names of the dead endure

more stubborn than kings or sanctions.

And so the resistance gathers not as thunder

but as the patient labour of winter roots,

the teacher hiding pamphlets in geometry books,

the oil worker slowing the obedient machine,

the mother stitching grief into a crimson scarf

to wrap around the neck of one more daughter marching.

In Washington they measure power by steel tonnage;

in Tel Aviv by walls and coded screens;

but in Shiraz an old poem survives another raid,

and that is why the tyrants cannot sleep.

For every anthem buried beneath the rubble

returns disguised as breath among the living,

until the streets themselves begin reciting

the dangerous truth: the people have remembered.

May 2026.