By Ehsan Rahmani
“The only notion I would let engage my mind is Future.” I read this phrase by Plato when I was a philosophy student in Iran. Those days were the most beautiful days of my life. I loved philosophy and as a poet I was a member of the Isfahan Ethical society. Poetry was a means of running away from the world of stubborn philosophical logics, and philosophy on the other hand was a stronghold against the invasions of the poetical dreams, exactly like fire and ice, both admirable and lovely but opposite to each other.
Those days “Future” did not engage my mind as much as what Plato had said, since I only would think about my own future that was unlikely to have a black spot on it. But when I decided to think of the future of 70 million Iranian citizens instead of my own, to think of the poverty and injustice that the Iranian people suffered I started to fully comprehend the true meaning of Plato’s philosophical phrase and this was how I decided to change the path of my own destiny.
I suddenly left everything behind, the university, the ethical society, my home and my family and only slipped a poetry book under my shirt and set on the path to fight for freedom. Since then, I feel as if I have been pushed down the Niagara Falls, and each second and each hour after that has been a new event for me. Although I have not lost my interest in poetry and philosophy but I have tried to coalesce them with laughter and tears and the strange feeling only found in short adventure tales!
I no longer write my feelings in the philosophy university nor in the ethical society, but in a Camp called Liberty. This camp is surrounded by the Iraqi forces and militia affiliated with the mullahs’ regime ruling Iran. In past 3 years, the Iranian regime with the help of its agents in Iraq has tried very hard to use every means, by implementation of blockade on logistic, medical or food supplies and also missile attacks to annihilate me and my colleagues or at least to break our will and make us give up and repent and kneel down in front of the mullahs.
I still commemorate some of my young colleagues who were slain in the recent massacre in my poems and my sentiments but the tragic side of it starts when the UN and U.S. ignore such atrocities committed by the Iranian regime in order to provide fuel for the negotiations with Mullahs, who are known to be the principle banker of terrorism. The atrocities that the international courts consider as “crime against humanity,” the atrocities against those that according to Plato had no engagement in their minds but the Future, the future of the children of their lands.
Ehsan Rahmani is a poet in Camp Liberty
Iran Liberty 