Studies of Shamlou’s politics of writing have largely read his poetry as allegories of the semi-colonial case of Iran. Through such representational readings, scholars have often imposed on Shamlou’s poetry formulations of the political that have their roots in colonial modernity. This paper examines alternative forms of political relationality through the close reading of a selection of poems from Shamlou’s post-1953-coup poetry. In the early 1950s, the poet-filmmaker Férydoun Rahnéma introduced Paul Éluard’s notion of poésie engagée to a circle of Iranian poets at the center of which was Ahmad Shamlou. Such a poetics promulgated the ideas of the self-identity of a class, the universally translatable discourse of resistance, and a notion of progress toward “an absolute humanism.” The catastrophic 1953 Coup in Iran, however, soon ruptured these ideals of internationalism. Shamlou publicly distanced himself from the organized communist activism, while his poetry remained haunted by a Marxist, internationalist specter. With the traumatic experience of losing several of his friends during this time, I argue, a notion of history emerges in Shamlou’s poetry that is often marked by a problematization of the notion of “aghaz” (origin)—in Greek “arche”—and the eternal recurrence of bearing witness to the moment of trauma. This notion of history resists any reduction to the dominant political fiction of the unified national history propagated by the Pahlavi Dynasty—a fiction predicated upon an ethno-racial nationalism and the idea of Persian as a “pure” national language. It simultaneously resists the very idea of the political as that which defines the relation of self-identical sovereign subjects. This paper concludes by reflecting on a new form of melancholic relationality in a selection of Shamlou’s later poetry that attends to what was erased by the very form of national politics—the non-identity.