"I Feel Freer Here," by Hans Ostrom (Lyrics), and Olaf Grounds (music & ...

Dancing Freely Away From the Fire

Phone-videos show

women waving hijabs
in the air as they dance
toward a fire, throw
the cloth in, dance away,
lifting their arms freely,
their black hair whirling.

Apparently these adult women
don't want to wear the hijabs.
In which case I would not want
them to wear them
and would feel like a combo
of bully and clown presuming
to tell them what to wear. Me,

I'm an American, looking on,
knowing the Iranian-American
history and thus not eager
to shove swaggering opinions around.

I'm an American married
to a woman with deep Sicilian roots,
so I've had refresher-courses
on not telling women what
to do. And I'm a human being

who knows what exhilarating
freedom looks like when I
see it on a phone-video:
that's enough for me. Naively,
a spectator with no effect,
I hope this is the start of
something big for Persian women.

"Love to Faults is Always Blind," by William Blake