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Yesterday a young woman died on the streets of Tehran. Within hours of the tragedy the Internet was full of cell-phone images of her last breath. Today, Neda is the face of Iran’s crisis. At one moment she is a girl strolling the streets alongside her (father*) music teacher, more an observer than a participant in the demonstrations; at the next moment an assassin’s bullet and her comrades’ cell-phone cameras transform Neda into a bleeding corpse and an immortalized martyr. As her(father’s*) comrades’ painful cries linger in our ears, a poet’s voice sings of her death. The only beauty in this tragedy is her face, and the knowledge that still, at this moment, the death of one girl is worthy of our attention — all too soon the dead will have no name.
*CORRECTION: The man walking with Neda, originally reported to be her father, was later identified as her music teacher.
NEDA (You Will Not Defeat The People!)
Neda was a young girl
She would not wear the hijab
She walked out on the streets of Tehran
To join the madding crowd
She felt a burning fire in her chest
And her blood began to flow
You will not defeat the people
When their lust for freedom grows
Down down go the concrete statues
Watch the faceless soldiers run
You will not defeat the people
When they learn that freedom’s fun
Neda was a young girl
Her eyes were black as coal
She walked out on to the streets of Tehran
To take back some control
Watch her father with her face in his hands
Screaming out into the sky
You will not defeat the people
When they learn that they can fly
(First verse again…)
You will not defeat the people
When it’s freedom that they know
You will not defeat the people
Crying Neda in the streets
You will not defeat the people
Crying Neda in their sleep.
Written & Sung by Johnny Maudlin
Thanks to my friend Saeid for introducing me to Neda.
LINK: NEDA AGHA-SOLTAN AT WIKIPEDIA
I offer this poem of loss by Majid Naficy 
(b. 1952) in honor of the daring democratic people of Iran. Nacify’s lyrical pen pricked the Shah’s sensibilities in the early 1970s, then drew revolutionary blood as his wife and brother fell to the bitter whim of the Shah’s pious successors. The poet fled his homeland in 1983, eventually settling in Los Angeles.