Mo H Saidi
www.mhsaidi.com
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Mo's Short Bio
Physician-Writer Mo H Saidi was born in Iran, moved to the United States in 1969, and became a U.S. citizen in 1975. While teaching gynecological surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, Texas, he founded an OB/GYN group practice. He published over fifty scientific papers in American medical journals, as well as a well-regarded textbook, Female Sterilization: A Handbook for Women (Garland Publishing). Saidi’s first book of poetry, Art in the City, won the 2007 Eakin Memorial Book Publication Award of the Poetry Society of Texas. His second collection of poetry, The Color of Faith (2010) was published by Pecan Grove Press at St. Mary's University; a novel, The Marchers was serialized in Voices de la Luna (2012); a collection of short fiction, The Garden of Milk and Wine (2012) published by Word Design Studio, and his third collection of poems Between A and Z: Poems (2014) by Wings Press. Saidi is the Managing Editor of Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Poetry & Arts Magazine (www.voicesdelaluna.com.) A member of The Authors Guild, he has published numerous essays, short fiction pieces, and poems in local, state, and national journals. His poems have appeared in various anthologies and in the Poetry Foundation and Poetry Magazines. Saidi is married and has three children and three grandchildren.


We Are Poets

A significant number of immigrants who have come

here to enjoy life and liberty and to pursue happiness

are now driving taxis: there in New York or here

in San Antonio. Some have become physicians,

some writers, and a very few poets:

Yes! “We think, therefore we live”

“we dream, therefore we exist.” Recalling our past,

we take our first step. Some cherish Rumi

and Khayam, and many read Shakespeare.

We search and struggle to find the right words
to describe our thoughts; and because
our vocabulary is small, we use dictionaries

and study words; we read our lines out loud,

albeit corrupted with accent; we write and rewrite;

we are perpetual students going to the academy---
to the university without walls---to learn,

like engineers, how to construct lines.

We rehearse our verses aloud,
we hum and produce rhythm and rhyme.
In the end, when many hours have gone by,
like Buddhist monks              
we blow away the light words and
what remains are only a few meaningful lines,
refined ideas, and a few poems;
the crux of our being, the heart of our mind.

Pictures from the Past Years: from Harvard to Hawaii