Marf Aghaei, the Poet of the Land

In Kurdistan, apart from the famous poets who wrote mostly poetry in the classical form, such as qasida and ghazal; some poets have taken a new path and created a very unique work by writing new poetry.

In Naghdeh, Urmia province, East part of Kurdistan, there is a youth named Marf Aghaei, who, although his death did not allow him to combine his pen and experience, make his works nicer, even in his youth, his works are extraordinary according to his ability.

Ma'ruf Aghaei, known as Marf Aghaei, was one of the poets who played an important role in modernizing Kurdish poetry in the eastern part of Kurdistan. He was born on January 22, 1966, in Wazne village of Naghdeh city of Sindus region. He passed away on February 14, 1998, due to a car accident.

Marf Aghaei completed his primary and secondary education in Naghdeh and moved to Shino with his family. There, he was imprisoned for a year in high school and stopped studying.

In 1985, he began publishing his poems and works in Sirwa magazine, along with the establishment of the Salahaddin Ayubi Literary and Cultural Center in Urmia. Two years later, he became a member of the editorial board of the same magazine.

In the last years of his life, he tried to learn Kurdish dialects and English in a short time. The result of this effort was the translation of the book "Kurdish Nationalist Feeling" into Kurdish, and unfortunately, the text of this translation is unavailable.

His book of poems and stories, Hard Earth and Distant Sky, was published after his death and has been considered an important work and special poetry by critics and experts of contemporary Kurdish poetry in the East part of Kurdistan, and much research has been written about it.

His poems were patriotic, mostly in resistance literature. In some poems about love, he mixes it with passion for the land and country.

All the poems in the book "Hard Earth and Distant Sky", except for two, "The Journey of Death and Life" and "Message", are short poems, none of which exceed one page. Marf Aghaei's two long poems were written under the influence of the post-uprising trend of writing long poems among poets in the southern part of Kurdistan. The content of the poem "Payam", which unfortunately remains incomplete due to the death of the poet and has been published incompletely, talks about the civil war between the political forces in the southern part of Kurdistan.

After the death of Marf Aghaei, several articles were published in magazines on his life and works. Most of these articles, along with several research papers, have been published in a book entitled "The Secret of the Survive of the Land" by Hadi Habibi.

In 1996, Marf Aghaei and his friends tried to establish the seventh Kurdish Institute in Tehran. The institute started its work by publishing a magazine called Kurdistan. After the publication of an issue of the magazine, the Ministry of Culture in Iran prevented the republication of the magazine, and several years after the closure of the magazine, the institute was closed forever.

One of Marf Aghaei's incomplete projects was the translation of Moin's Persian dictionary, which was distributed to dozens of Kurdish writers and linguists in the eastern part of Kurdistan to have a large Persian-Kurdish dictionary after translating all its letters. Then, using the Kurdish words collected through the translation of Mo'in's dictionary, they should also form a large Kurdish-Persian dictionary.

After a lot of service and many valuable works and new projects in the Kurdish Culture and Literature Publishing Center and Sirwa magazine, such as organizing literary and cultural conferences from Ilam to Urmia and establishing many contacts with writers from different regions of Kurdistan cultural cooperation, on January 10, 1997, he passed away in a car accident. He was returning from the funeral of Mina Khanim, the wife of Peshawa Qazi, to Urmia from Mahabad with the writers of Sirwa magazine "Jaafar Qazi" and "Sartip Mansouri", their hearts stopped beating. He was buried in the celebrities' section of Budagh Sultani Cemetery in Mahabad near the graves of Hazhar and Hemn on his will.

Two examples of his poems:

"Mirage"

I get used to my thirst,

If the shiny dance of the mirages leaves me.

I blossom in my loneliness,

If the autumn breath of these strange acquaintances

stay away from me.

I will live in your memory, O freedom!

If the bitter memories of the days in prison

Stop hurting me!

"Martyr"

A leaf fell off.