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Mahoud Moshref Azad Tehrani (M. Azad)
Poems
Iran
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Translated to English by Manavaz Alexadrian
Among the Kind
What has happened to us that
No more
Do we compose a poem for the jungle
(A poem for the town),
A poem for the rose,
For a heart,
For a wound,
Or for a star?
Has the glory of the event caused the mass of poets
To get confounded?
Has your lyre ruptured,
And your plectrum is broken,
That you are sitting subdued and unbelieving
While the river is gliding by.
You have given up your ruptured lyre with your plectrum and
You are awake
And from your ivy covered narrow window whose red color
Stretches to the silent solitude
(You cry and do not cry!)
As if there is no window,
With heavy curtains,
And in your melancholy night ghosts
Are bending
With trembling hands.
In the assembly of the kind,
I wanted to say:
"Friends...",
For God's...
Pause...,
Rain!"
And it was a heavy bewilderment
And all that was there was hatred and damnation.
What nights I have seen
In the nocturnal privacy of friends,
With too much hue and cry
How heavy the bewilderment had sat?
In the assembly of the kind,
Those who cried
For many years:
"Ah, voice of the prisoner,
Ah the last voice of voices,
Will not your complaint of disappointment ever
Dig a tunnel towards light
From any corner in this hateful night?"
Alas, I am sunk in my pain,
And in accompanying astonishment
I wanted to say:
At the morning twilight
The cry of the purple
Is cold and sterile!"
But how?
What a heavy bewilderment...!
Letter
Here, my dear!
I see the sun in front of me every evening
At the end of anemone-like horizon in my sleep:
And the moon also - which is pale
And the town also - which is nameless.
Here your memory is always alive with me,
From the beginning of the red anemone-like awakening:
With streams - that flow
And towns - which are illuminated.
Here it is you is laughing , with a smile,
In the green eye of a silent passerby;
Awake - with a drunken sleep of last night,
With colorful garments -
And that cautious yet dark and light gaze;
Like the break of dawn,
Pure like ever,
Like your memory which is always with me.
It is not Man only
It is not man only who weeps:
I have seen birds,
I have seen the leave and wind and rain
Weeping.
Man only
Is not weeping.
It is not man only who sings:
I have heard songs from the stone,
And melodies from plants.
I myself have heard a song from the wind and the leave.
Man only
Is not a singer.
It is not man only who loves:
The sea and rain,
The sun and farms are all
Lovers.
It is not man only...
Many only is a big loneliness:
Man is breathing death,
His deadly dreams are destructive.
Evening
Like the bird who craves to die,
like a blossom which craves to wither,
like this silent paper bird,
it was sitting there,
looking like a bird
backing the rain:
the rain poured behind the window and stopped;
I was afraid to say:
- all blossoms are made of paper.
I was afraid to say:
- I had bought the bird from a peddler
about nine years ago
and had emptied his eye sockets
of green glasses.
I was afraid to say:
my room
is silent and papery,
the rain behind the window is no rain.
Behind the window
the rain poured,
stopped,
I was afraid,
like this silent blossom
like this silent bird,
was sitting there
backing the green window.
I was afraid that one night termites
had aroused a tempest!
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