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I have been painting birds for as long as I can remember.
Not just because they are beautiful — though they are.
Not just because they fly — though I’ve often wished to.
But because they carry something wordless that I’ve always tried to understand.

Each bird I paint is like a syllable.
Together, they form the poem I have been writing with my hands across decades.
Sometimes alone, sometimes in flight, sometimes gathered like secrets in a tree.
They are not symbols, not decorations.
They are companions.

Birds have followed me through every stage of my life.
They watched me as a girl in Iran, as a student far from home, as a woman rebuilding, remembering, re-rooting.
They arrived when I was silent.
They stayed when others left.
They carried fragments of my language, of my longing, and scattered them into sky.

In Persian miniature painting, birds often appear in gardens — part of a delicate paradise.
In Sufi poetry, they sing the soul’s yearning.
In my paintings, they do not belong to a place or a rule.
They belong to movement.
To softness.
To persistence.

I don’t always know why I paint them.
But when I do, I feel closer to the part of me that is free — and quietly fierce.

This is the poem I’ve never stopped writing.
It has no final verse.
Only wings.