The Baha'is in Iran

[RonPrice]

There's current events and current events....
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The Hunt for Red October


If you take seriously the wish to be a poet, you should write voraciously and everyday. -Ezra Pound in W.S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry, Carl Nelson and Ed Folsom, editors, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1987, p.1.

There is a vast and unutterable silence to reality. It is in our power to turn this chaotic and alien reality into a formed beauty. -W.S. Merwin: Essays on the Poetry, Cary Nelson and Ed Folsom, editors, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1987, p.2.


In October1 when I was getting
ready to move into the big leagues
and the Arabs were making theirs,
the Bahai's were getting ready
for their big move from sixty-nine
to ninety-six thousand localities;
the world was moving through
the first stages of the dark heart
of an age of transition,
the beginnings of universal anarchy.

Small wonder, then,
that my own life moved into:
its own share of anarchy,
marital discord,
mild schizo-affective states,
frenetic forms of flow
in those fast and apparently
winning lanes where you feel
as if it’s all happening.

Ron Price
27 December 1996

1 In October 1973 I was getting ready for my big move to work at was then a college of advanced education, now university, in Launceston, Tasmania. In that same month the Arabs for “the first time since the days of the Crusades.....managed to gain the upper hand in open, large-scale armed conflict with a non-Muslim force.”(Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind, Charles Scribner’s Sons, NY, 1975, p.ix.)

[RonPrice]

It has been 5 months since my last post here, so let me add another brief comment. Of course, what is brief to one is not brief to another. Anyway, on with the prose-poetry show:
_______________________
THE SWARM OF BEES


This poem drifted in like some calm, coolness. In some silent, grass-growing mood, I composed a few lines as I took an early morning walk. Ideas and words creeped out of my head after that initial drifting-in of thought. I caught a few and hurried home to torture them into some kind of shape. Or was it more a matter of wooing combinations and inspirations into being from that depth and continuity of attention and meditation where they had been lieing for years? -Ron Price with thanks to Rimbaud in Silences, Tillie Olsen, Delta Pub., 1965, p.7; Joseph Conrad, ibid., p.157; and Henry James, source unknown.


They1 drifted in and landed like
a swarm of bees sweetening this
old, dry land with a honey it had
not known. There were some stings,
too, sharp, and swellings, sore for days;
I saw the buzz, those first years, when
they alighted in the cities all across
the continent, when they changed
the very colour of our days.
It was all too much those first years,
like a rich diet of over-sugared sweets
and the Aussi with his cynical
beneath surface skepticism blowing them away.
I was one; I had needed an excuse to buzz
more quietly away from the other bees.
And so I did and so did they,
many of the Aussis of old.
They saddled on over to the perifery
and you didn’t see them much
and they didn’t see you.

Gradually, the bees spread across the land
and buzzed in culturally appropriate ways
helping to achieve the befitting crescendo
of this fourth epoch.

1 After the revolution in Iran in 1979 Iranians came to Australia in the thousands as refugees. They also came in from England, the USA, Pakistan and India. I arrived in Perth in late 1987 by which time there were at least four or five hundred in Perth; by 1997 there were over a thousand. Now, as I post this prose-poem at MacForums in 2006, there are over 2000 Baha'is in metropolitan Perth. My guess is that 80 percent are 1st or 2nd generation Iranians.

[RonPrice]

Iranian Authorities Demolish Baha’i Cemetery
August 6th, 2007 by Admin
Omid, a Baha’i whose family is from Yazd, recently posted this on the website "Mideast Youth":

The destruction of yet another Baha’i holy place in Iran has prompted an outcry by Baha’is around the world, who see that the Iranian Government is persisting in a campaign of persecution so extreme in the fanaticism driving it that it even jeopardizes invaluable assets of the country’s cultural heritage. The Baha’i community of Iran, with about 300,000 members, is that country’s largest religious minority.

With some seven million members in more than 180 countries worldwide, the Baha’i Faith is an independent religion that promotes such teachings as the oneness of humanity, the underlying unity of the religions, the equality of women and men, and the need to eliminate prejudice.

Since 1979, despite their peaceful character, more than 200 Iranian Baha’is have been killed, and hundreds more have been tortured and imprisoned. Tens of thousands have lost jobs, pensions, and access to education, all solely because the clerics who rule Iran declare them heretics.

“The hatred of the extremist mullahs for the Baha’is is such that they, like the Taliban of Afghanistan who destroyed the towering Buddhist sculptures at Bamiyan, intend not only to eradicate the religion, but even to erase all traces of its existence in the country of its birth…”

A Baha’i Perspective: Bahman Payman
August 1st, 2007 by Admin
Another interesting and recent podcast of a Baha’is experiences in Iran:

A Baha’i from Iran who came to the United States to finish his medical schooling. After completing his schooling, he returned to Iran and worked at a Baha’i hospital called Red Lion Society. When the Khomeini regime took over, they confiscated the hospital, assassinated the chief of staff, Dr. Hakim, and arrested or killed other Baha’i physicians working there. Bahman and his family happened to be in the US when this happened, so he stayed in the US and practiced medicine here. He’s now retired and is volunteering for two Baha’i-inspired institutions, Health for Humanity and the Tahirih Justice Center.

Posted at this Mac Forums Site by Ron Price of George Town Tasmania.

[mpw]

...sixty-nine...
Mmmmm