A Poem

Another Birth-Forough Farrokhzad

Translations by Ismā'il Salāmi

My entire soul is a murky verse

Reiterating you within itself

Carrying you to the dawn of eternal burstings and blossomings

In this verse, I sighed you, AH!

In this verse,

I grafted you to trees, water and fire

Perhaps life is

A long street along which a woman

With a basket passes every day

Perhaps life

Is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch

Perhaps life is a child returning home from school

Perhaps life is the lighting of a cigarette

Between the lethargic intervals of two lovemakings

Or the puzzled passage of a passerby

Tipping his hat

Saying good morning to another passerby with a vacant smile

Perhaps life is that blocked moment

When my look destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes

And in this there is a sense

Which I will mingle with the perception of the moon

And the reception of darkness

In a room the size of one solitude

My heart

The size of one love

Looks at the simple pretexts of its own happiness,

At the pretty withering of flowers in the flower pots

At the sapling you planted in our flowerbed

At the songs of the canaries

Who sing the size of one window.

Ah

This is my lot

This is my lot

My lot

Is a sky, which the dropping of a curtain seizes from me

My lot is going down an abandoned stairway

And joining with something in decay and nostalgia

My lot is a cheerless walk in the garden of memories

And dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me:

"I love

Your hands"

I will plant my hands in the flowerbed

I will sprout, I know, I know, I know

And the sparrows will lay eggs

In the hollows of my inky fingers

I will hang a pair of earrings of red twin cherries

Round my ears

I will put dahlia petals on my nails

There is an alley

Where the boys who were once in love with me,

With those disheveled hairs, thin necks and gaunt legs

Still think of the innocent smiles of a little girl

Who was one night blown away by the wind

There is an alley which my heart

Has stolen from places of my childhood

The journey of a volume along the line of time

And impregnating the barren line of time with a volume

A volume conscious of an image

Returning from the feast of a mirror

This is the way

Someone dies

And someone remains

No fisherman will catch pearls

From a little stream flowing into a ditch

I

Know a sad little mermaid

Dwelling in the ocean

Softly, gently blowing

Her heart into a wooden flute

A sad little mermaid

Who dies with a kiss at night

And is born again with another kiss at dawn

My friend, May, sent this poem to me a while back. I always find myself returning to it every now and then, and it's still as beautiful as the first time I read it.

-t

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