PBS:

On Monday, Tehran-born poet Kaveh Akbar began tweeting out poetry written by poets from the seven countries — Iran, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, and Syria — impacted by President Donald Trump’s executive order that temporarily bans immigrants from those countries.

The poetry Akbar shared includes work from Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan poet born in Benghazi who emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, Ladan Osman, who was born in Somalia and raised in Columbus, Ohio, and Safia Elhillo, a poet born in the U.S. to Sudanese parents, but who didn’t move to the U.S. until the year 2000.

Akbar said he was inspired to tweet Monday morning while reading the poetry of Persian poet Majid Naficy, and wondering what his life would be like without having read Naficy’s work. Naficy, who was born and raised in Iran, fled to the U.S. after Ayatollah Khomeini established theocratic rule in Iran in 1979, an experience that appears in Naficy’s poetry. His poem, “Allowance,” begins with the lines: “When creeping out of his tight skin / He suffers pain / And the world becomes small for him.”...

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