Mo H. Saidi
Physician Poet Author
Mo H. Saidi is a physician-writer who was born in Iran and moved to the United States in 1969. He gained American citizenship in 1975. After completing medical education, OB/GYN residency, and gynecology-oncology fellowship, Saidi founded an OB/GYN group practice in San Antonio while teaching at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. During his medical career, he published over 50 scientific papers in American medical journals and medical media, and a textbook, Female Sterilization: A Handbook for Women. After studying for six summers in Boston, Saidi earned a master’s degree in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University in 2007. After retiring from medicine & teaching, he devoted his time to reading & writing prose & poetry in English. His first book of poetry, Art in the City, won the PST manuscript award & was published in 2007 by Eakin Press and won first place in the Iowa Poetry Association Award in 2007. In 2010, St. Mary’s University’s Pecan Grove Press published his second poetry collection, The Color of Faith. Saidi’s collection of short fiction, The Garden of Milk and Wine, was published in 2014, Between A and Z: Poems by Wings Press, and in 2015, The Marchers: A Novel was published in print and as an eBook by Word Design Press. Participant Media considered the novel as a movie. Saidi’s poems have won local, state, and national awards and have appeared in the Poetry Society of Texas anthology: Book of the Year; the National Federation of State Poetry Societies’ Prize Poems anthology: Encore; on the Poetry Foundation website, in Boston Review, Poet Magazine, and other regional and national literary journals. He has won the 2017 Chautauqua Short Fiction Award. Word Design Press has published his second novel, Esther and a Genius in 2019. He is married and has three adult children and four grandchildren. Saidi plays chess in his free time and bikes for 15-20 miles daily.
WELCOME
My Birth, My Name
“What’s in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
At the dawn of one Monday, the second day of February 1942 (2/2/1942), during the high point of World War II, as the city of Ahvaz was under siege by the Allied forces and was under a curfew from sunset to sunrise, my mother realized she was in active labor and about to deliver me. And it’s my head that tries to enter the world and occupy the space between her thighs. She lies flat on the concrete surface and prays loudly. My father hears her moans, turns over, and no-tices her absence. Reluctantly, he leaves the bed and walks to the courtyard. Mother is on the ground with my head passing through her vagina. My Father quickly takes a towel, supports it, and holds the crown. He watches the neck, shoulders, and upper limbs swiftly exiting the vagina. The abdomen and the rest of my body follow the course. Finally, he shakes his head and mur-murs, “Look, Bibi, this baby’s head is as big as a watermelon.” Now squatting near Mother, my father picks me up and wraps me in a towel.