Farzad composed this letter to his students the day after his death sentence was decreed. It was translated from Farsi for barricadejournal.org by Tyler Fisher and Haidar Khezri.

Hello, class.

My heart constricts from missing every one of you. Here in prison I compose the poem of life’s eternal song, day and night, with sweet recollections and dreams of you…when we returned, exhausted from all the excitement of our games in the fields (an “official school field trip,” we called it, of course)…

I wish we could again furtively practice our Kurdish alphabet, far from the principal’s stern eye, and compose poems for each other in our mother tongue, and sing and dance hand in hand, and dance and dance…

I wish I could again join in the “Ring-around-the-Uncle” game, leading the chants of the first-grade girls, you girls who, years later, at the corner of a page in your diary will write: “I wish I wasn’t born a girl.”… you would not be forced to bid farewell to school for the last time at age thirteen, with eyes full of tears and regret, under the white veil of becoming a woman, and would not experience, with every fiber of your being, the bitter story of the second-class gender…

You sons of the land of nature and the Sun, I know you are no longer able to sit with your classmates, to read and laugh, because right after the tragedy of becoming a man, the grief of earning your daily bread will seize you by the collar. But remember not to turn your back on poetry, on song, on your lovers and your shared dreams. Teach your children to be heirs of poetry and rain, for their homeland, for their todays and their tomorrows.