On the occasion of the 18 Tir anniversary of the student movement and a poem by the late Azat Ebrahimnejad, martyred on 18 Tir 78

Remember us! Remember those we were, just newly twenty-two-year-old youths.

We had the ardor of love in our chests, and before we became lovers, our chests died, buried in dust.

Remember us! Remember us, whose chest-singing was the harbinger of song, and in ten by ten not in the sky and not in the mountains and not on the branches but in the bazaar—before we became singers we surrendered life to a frail branch from our own support.

I remember their message, their fate, yes… And always, in the corridor of my memory, in its passageway, the silent songs of chest-singers that scorched hearts, and the embodiment of the hopes of the twenty-two-year-olds on stone, and from the repetition of remembering them—perhaps, before I become a poet, I will die at twenty-two…