Soraya Shalforoosh
“While My Guitar Gently Weeps” Plays While on a Coffee Break with a Co-worker
We were just catching up about our respective departments, how the firm has changed over the years. The Muslim ban affecting us on both personal and professional levels. But I could still hear George in the background of the cafe and my heart was calling me. Play it when you get back to your desk, my rational mind whispered. Listen to your colleague. So now I have George on YouTube singing “gently weeps” with Clapton on guitar, but I watch George, thinking about how many times his hands played that exact chord and in that sequence, and that guitar pick hitting those strings in beauty, and how to be that pick would be, well, to be love. The triangle of it enters my mind and I want to put it on my tongue and let it dissolve like medicine. I see white, I see tortoise shell, I see George’s Jesus face. 11,264,869 views on YouTube alone. And George is gone. George is with “sweet lord” and this song is playing and the guitar is weeping, in Soho cafes and lots of rooms across this land and Canada, and across the Atlantic and across the Pacific and across the Mediterranean and across my family, my family in Iran whom I haven’t seen in years can listen to this too and know we can hear the same music sometimes too if I post it on social media. I can message it across to Iran and skype with my cousins. Hamid, who is always awake and with a cigarette, might like the Beatles, who doesn’t? The immediacy of weeping guitars and sleeping love music and far away banned family gets to me and
I do it, too.
Soraya Shalforoosh is the author of This Version of Earth (Barrow Street, 2014). She has been a featured poet in the Journal of the Academy of American Poets Emerging Poet Series, and has had poems and reviews in Black Earth Institute, Apogee Journal, Taos Journal, Barrow Street, Lumina Journal, Skanky Possum, and Marlboro Review, among others. She hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and as an undergraduate at Clark University won the Prentiss Cheney Hoyt Poetry award. She has been a guest poet at William Paterson University in New Jersey, Berkeley College in New York, San Jose State University and a guest speaker at the American Embassy in Algeria.
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