Iran speaks through musaddas,
six-line poems in Farsi script writ
                                         
                                       right
                        to
      left

giant postage stamps pasted
in a tableau, two to a row,
laid out like tarot stone
tablets from Mt. Sinai, each
nearly identical to the other                        
                                                    to my eye   
                                                    but                                                 
I can’t read the language &
Englishmen don’t understand

Musaddas writ in black on white
hard as Hammurabi’s diorite
held, by faith, impervious to bombs

Bargaining not transactional
more revelation or judgment
how the Prophet did back in the day