ohsen Hosseinkhani’s A Bird on the Waiting Branch is a book of thresholds, between lovers and distances, tenderness and terror, the private ache of longing and the public wound of war. In Tahere Forsat Safaei’s clear-eyed translation, these poems move with a grave music, their melancholy sharpened into images you won’t easily shake: a dried river under a bridge, a child with a snapped balloon string, an angel whose wings are glass.
At the book’s heart is the address to a missing “you,” a second person that magnetizes the speaker’s world. Hosseinkhani is at his most luminous when love is treated not as ornament but as physics: “a strong magnet” that can find the needle in a haystack; “the promise of God to Noah” against the flood of time. The distance is so absolute that the book risks myth, “Wherever you have gone / Is the farthest place of the world” yet the feeling lands because the metaphors keep rooting themselves in the tactile. The mouth that cannot say a name feels as useless as a bridge without water beneath it; the body becomes a field of practical objects failing at their purposes. It’s love poetry written with the toolbox of necessity.
Threaded through this longing is a stark meditation on mortality. Time, in these poems, is a burglar and a tutor, “transmuting everything,” training spiders to hunt across the museum of family photos. The body, meanwhile, refuses to behave like a soul: the heart is “a chunk of flesh that rots,” a baffling engine whose life “depends on… death.” These lines tilt toward the philosophical without losing their sting. Even when the speaker widens the lens to species-level self-portraiture, humans as “shallow water fish” or “domestic chickens / Leaving flight in the dark nests” the images remain tactile, a reminder that abstraction can be most credible when it leaves dirt under its nails.
The book’s late turn to war is devastating and, crucially, unsentimental. Hosseinkhani’s battlefield isn’t a tableau of heroics but a ledger of violations, recorded with a documentarian’s chill: “The flower of a women’s skirt being scythed by a gun,” “a handful of hair leaving in a soldier’s feast.” The poems insist on the asymmetries of suffering “In war / Men are killed once / Women thousand times” and they do so without rhetorical excess. Even the world’s colors and chronologies buckle: “sirens got red / Sooner than pomegranates,” “underground got dark / Sooner than the night.” The result is a moral weather report that feels, sadly, contemporary.
Safaei’s translation deserves special notice for preserving the book’s double register: intimate address and fable-like estrangement. At times, the English surfaces with a purposeful literalness (“Humans got loneliness / Day after day”) that may read as stiff to some ears. Yet that plainness often heightens the poems’ haunted directness, and when a line trembles with ambiguity—“Its life depends on Its death”—the uncertainty feels philosophically earned rather than merely awkward. If a few metaphors pile high (a whale inhaling gloom beside a turtle digging the sky), the excess reads as a deliberate poetics to overwhelm: a mind trying too many doors hoping one of them must open.What lingers, finally, is the book’s stubborn faith in what survives. Even among ruins, the gaze finds “the look of two lovers / In a funeral / Tears and shyness together.” The title’s bird keeps its “song on its beak,” poised at the edge of utterance. That edge is where these poems live—hushed, bruised, and unafraid to name what hurts.
Readers drawn to lyric meditation, to poetry that fuses the domestic with the geopolitical, will find a fierce companion here. A Bird on the Waiting Branch doesn’t console so much as clarify: it shows how love and fear, grief and endurance, are not opposites but neighbors. Open it for the images; stay for the moral steadiness; return for the lines that echo long after the page is closed.
