The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.
Throughout April we are mixing it up in honor of National Poetry Month. We’ll be bringing you one poem each week from a Bay Area poet with an upcoming reading.
Iranian-born poet and educator Rooja Mohassessy selected her poem “Ramazan in Tajrish” from her debut collection, When Your Sky Runs Into Mine, because it captures her love for the month of Ramadan. When Mohassessy was a child, no one in her family was particularly devout except her grandmother.
“My putting this collection together and writing poems is a way for me to pay homage to family and also to just my heritage after having almost blocked out that part of myself, of my identity,” said Mohassessy. “So it’s kind of coming full circle and reclaiming my voice.”
Mohassessy immigrated to the U.S. when she was 12 years old to escape conflict in Iran, leaving her parents behind.