Mashhad

by Layla Sabourian-Tarwe

Monday March 16th, 9 a.m.

(But the Sky Thinks It’s 4)

The bread seller opens at nine
but the streetlights are still burning.

Smoke has turned the morning
into a rumor of night.

Some cities wake to sunlight.
Mashhad wakes to sirens
and a sky the color of burned paper.

Pilgrims arrived all night
on buses crossing the desert
to kneel beneath the golden dome
of Imam Reza Shrine.

Now the dome floats in smoke
like a coin dropped
into dark water.

My mother says stay inside.

On television the announcer speaks softly
about missiles
and responses
and the mathematics of retaliation.

Three nations argue with heaven.

Israel.
Iran.
United States.

Three faiths claiming the same sky.

Jews.
Christians.
Muslims.

Each one certain
God is standing on their side
of the explosion.

Meanwhile the sky
belongs to smoke.

Somewhere in this city
a grave is waiting.

One day
Ali Khamenei
will be carried through these streets
toward the earth of his birthplace.

The clerics say power is eternal.

But graves
are patient teachers.

We sit in the corridor,
the safest wall in the apartment.

My cousin reads horoscopes
from a magazine printed months ago
as if the stars have not also
been chased away by the smoke.

I keep thinking about light.

How it travels billions of years
through cold empty space
just to arrive here
and shatter into color.

Red beside violet.
Violet beside orange.

None of them accusing the others
of blasphemy.

They are one light
interrupted by glass.

Maybe God is like that.

Not a throne.
Not a book.
Not a border.

Maybe God is simply
the bright animal of life
moving through everything.

White light.

And the human mind
a prism.

The prophets
the colors.

Slices of the same brightness
we try to hold in our hands.

But the light is too large.

So we mistake the pieces
for enemies.

We draw lines between colors.

We build armies for them.

We bomb cities
to defend a fragment
of the sun.

Outside the bread seller counts change.

Someone sweeps glass from a doorway.

A taxi driver lights a cigarette
and studies the sky
as if trying to remember
what morning used to look like.

I eat breakfast in the dark.

Tea.
Sugar cubes.
The radio off.

My mother counts the eggs
like a woman counting days.

The cat watches the window
twitching her tail
to the distant rhythm of impact.

What the bombs don't understand—
what the generals don't understand—
what the ayatollahs and prophets
have never understood—

is that you cannot liberate a prism
by smashing it.

You only lose the colors.

Outside it is nine in the morning.

But above Mashhad
the sky still believes it is four.

My mother says eat, it will get cold
as if warmth were still something fragile—

and today,
in this smoke-dark city,

it is.

BIO: Layla Sabourian-Tarwe is a poet and writer whose work moves between intimate personal moments and broader cultural, spiritual, and political landscapes. Her experience spans life in Iran and the U.S., and her work often centers on urban life under pressure, memory, exile, and the quest for light amid darkness.