Antiwar Voices Honor Parnia Abbasi, Iranian Poet Killed by Israeli Bombing

Peace advocates including a prominent Iranian academic and Venezuelan delegates to a United Nations event in Paris paid homage Wednesday to a young Iranian poet killed along with her parents and teenage brother last week during Israeli bombing of Tehran.

Parnia Abbasi, who was just days away from her 24th birthday, was killed in a June 13 airstrike on a residential complex in Tehran's Sattarkhan neighborhood during the first wave of Israel's unprovoked U.S.-backed war on Iran, which has reportedly killed at least 585 people and wounded over 1,300 others as of early Wednesday.

Iranian media reported that Parviz Abbasi and Masoumeh Shahriari—Parnia's retired father and mother—and her younger brother Parham Abbasi were also killed in the Israeli strike. The family was reportedly sleeping when their home was bombed.

According to The Washington Post's Yeganeh Torbati:

[Abbasi] dreamed of seeing the band Coldplay live in concert. She loved trying new foods and was learning Italian. She wrote poetry constantly and shared it with friends and family. She was so proud of having summited Iran's highest peak, Mount Damavand, that she made sure to mention that fact to everyone she met. She was, as her friends described in phone interviews and text messages this week, as bright and full of life as the sunflowers that she adored...

Abbasi's friends shared in interviews, messages, and on social media their favorite memories of her: how she took them camping outdoors for the first time, how she freely gave them gifts, how her sense of humor often took a moment to sink in and then bowled them over with laughter. She did silly dances for the camera.

The Tehran Times called Abbasi, who was also an English teacher, "a rising star among Iran's new generation of poets" who was "celebrated for her poignant and introspective poetry."

Abbasi was quoted in a memorial post by the literary magazine Vazn-e Donya as saying, "I look at everything that happens to me as something I might be able to write down—to express the feeling I had in that moment through poetry."

The following is an excerpt from Abbasi's best-known poem, The Extinguished Star, as translated by Ghazal Mosadeq:

you and I will come to an end
somewhere
the most beautiful poem in the world
falls quiet
you begin
somewhere
to cry the
murmur of life
but I will end
I burn
I'll be that extinguished star
in your sky
like smoke

The Tehran Times reported that renowned Iranian academic and artist Zahra Rahnavard—who according to the advocacy group PEN America has been under unofficial house arrest since 2011 for her women's rights activism—said during a Wednesday tribute to Abbasi that "women have always been the first victims in times of conflict."

"This time, they fell prey to bombardments carried out by a criminal infamous worldwide for killing women and children, from Gaza to Iran," she added, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Palestine.

Members of Venezuela's delegation to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) 10th Assembly of the Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions in Paris also honored Abassi Wednesday, lamenting that "a voice died, a legacy in the making, another opportunity for cultural dialogue among peoples."

Arvin Abedi, one of Abbasi's many friends, told the Post that "when war happens, it's not just military people... who are casualties... Ordinary people can easily be destroyed."

Abedi added that Abbasi "has the right to not be forgotten."