Tehran, November 1979

My ticket stub is already sweaty in my fist 
and I’m not even in the theater yet, just staring
at the garishly painted posters touting a film 
we know nothing about. Alain Delon, dashing 
and congenial, a medic in a field hospital, like M*A*S*H, perhaps. 
How bad could it be? This might be fun.
Two months after our return from California, and just days 
after US Embassy personnel were paraded across our tv screen, 
blindfolded and haggard, we are here 
at the movie house on the former Pahlavi Avenue, 
hoping for a normal afternoon at the movies: 
four seats in the middle row, a carpet of sunflower seed hulls 
underfoot, courtesy of the previous audience, our daughters, 
six and almost five, dipping tiny hands into the popcorn, 
which Iranians call chos e fil, elephant farts, as the young 
nephews in the family are fond of telling me, watching 
carefully for my reaction. Were we right to bring the children here?  
We’re flying blind. No guidance from any movie rating system,
just the delicate sensibilities of the mullahs.  
But if the mullahs allow it, how bad could it be?
After all, there will be no kissing, no mounting, no prostitution, 
no backsides, no heavy breathing, no nipples, no drugs, 
no subverting Islam, no insulting the Imam.  
But will there be irony?  I’m missing irony.  
And then the shrapnel bomb explodes in the field hospital, 
a hundred tiny metal shards piercing the skin of the pretty nurse,
and our children scream and look at us 
as if we have betrayed a covenant.   
The revolution was televised. We watched it in California,
wondering if we should return to Iran.
How bad could it be? It couldn’t be worse than the shah. 
And here we are, the earth having shifted under our feet, 
Pahlavi Avenue gone and Valiasr Avenue in its place, 
named for the Twelfth Imam, the Imam of Time, 
the one who disappeared and will reappear at the Reckoning.  
When I first came here in 1971, I barely had any trash to put out
for the garbage man.  Eight years later there is so much more to throw away.