Mimi Khalvati (b. 1944, Tehran) spent much of her childhood at boarding school on the Isle of Wight, only returning to Iran at 17. She has been resident in the UK since the age of 25, where she has published ten collections of poetry, winning an Arts Council Writers’ Award for Mirrorwork (Carcanet Press 1995), alongside working in the theatre as an actor and director. Khalvati was awarded the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2023 and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
‘Yes, you were, you were,’ I laughed, ‘golden children!’ Through all those years of hubris, me taking pride, As though it were my doing, in that golden, Blameless childhood, you with no cause to hide Anything more than a boy’s guilty pleasures. But how you hid when the sky split, the voices came, Each with a face you drew, wild familiars, Grotesques that only talking to could tame. Then on their heels crept silences: your childhood, Mother, father, sister, all held at bay, All suspect. Illness might be in the blood, Even how we laugh in our DNA. Yet how we laughed, there in the sun that spread Through leaves and seemed to gild what my son said!
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