TENDER

Tuesday April 1st 2008 my friend Harriet Tannenbaum passed away at age 91 in Hollywood. I met her at Ucla in 1993. She helped me with the editing of both collections of my poetry "Muddy Shoes" and "Father and Son" as well as my doctroal dissertation "Modernism and Ideology in Persian Literature" as had been acknowledged in the preface to these books.

On March 20, 1997 when in celebration of Persian New Year I organized a poetry reading called "Persian Poetry in Los Angeles" in Beyond Baroque literary center, Venice, in which five Iranian poets, late Nader Naderpour, Partow Nuriala, Mansour Khaksar, Abbas Safarri and I read our poems in English, Harriet read Naderpour's poetry on his behalf in English and was much admired by him. She helped me to come at peace with my new homeland as can be seen in this poem which I wrote eleven years ago:

My American mother says,
`In the next circle of life
I want to become
A tall, shade tree.`

I look at her little body
Still upright
Leaning on her steady cane,
And her kind eyes
Shining like my mother's
In Iran,
And I know
That I want to become a bird.