|
|
|
|
Farrokh Tamimi
Poems
Iran
|
Translated to English by Manavaz Alexadrian
Fare welling Hands
I saw the fare welling hands,
They were sickly,
When my hand
Touched her cold and long fingers
Which was from the family of the wailing reed
It gripped an eternal grief in its fist;
The pen broke
And pain
Like black drops of ink
dropped on our papery hearts.
I saw the fare welling hands,
They were sickly;
Stranger to love and the benevolent
hand of age...
History has recorded on our papery hearts
By the reed
And each partition of the reed
Complains of the Masnavi of our groans: ...??
The lines in your hands
(these winding roads)
Is familiar to my eye.
Believe me
The lines in your hand
Are more familiar to me than my own lines...
Ah
O friend...
They buried us together in the grave
A thousand years ago,
...
And this is the friendship of centuries and centuries of death.
We saw the fare welling hands,
They were sickly.
It was the hand of age,
it was the hand of the millennium.
The Time of Death
In a knapsack of bitter life
I
Brought the message of unity from rivers
And the message of separation from winds
As a gift;
In the boundless glorious expanse of thought,
Upon my lofty peak of heart...
A lifetime
I sat alone with myself
Here
In blood,
In fire.
I learned
The big secret of existence,
I learned how to die,
I learned
To record with my own hand
The time of my death.
Alas O ancient reader,
In this narrow cage
You are not conscious;
Your heart
Is beating in the closed fists of strangers;
You are not awake so that I can tell you
How and where you must die.
Farhad
A dumb halo of sorrow lurks in Shirin's cold gaze,
Reclining on the marble columns of the veranda,
A pregnant cat is sleeping on her lap
And slowly snores.
The Shirin's image north of the garden
Is hanging on an apple tree;
Khosrow, in love with another mistress, mockingly mutters;
How can the eye in this image
Show the trace of lover breathing eye of Shirin?...??
For a moment Khosrow beats at the bow and says:
Shirin's eye is a good target, I have ordained
That this new bow should be tried on it.
Khosrow, the king of the world,
The master of archers,
Pulled out an arrow from his quiver.
This Parthian arrow, this nimble flying hawk,
Is familiar with the bow and the thumb.
A spark rose from Mount Bistoun,
Was it the lightening from Farhad's ax?
An angry flame is blazing in the image's eye,
The loud uproar,
The loud clamor of Farhad's heart,
Is robing sleep from the cat's eye.
The Doors and Walls
We are two walls,
We are two lofty walls in a narrow street,
The hands of a mason whose name was fate or another thing
Was laying the mud bricks of youth
Over each other and was laughing.
Our youthful hearts
Groaned in the mud of each brick.
We are two walls,
For many years,
Days,
Nights,
We see hasty passersby walking to their business,
Passersby who are talking to each other,
Passersby who are lonely and lonely.
We are two walls and the eye-lid of each gate is shut for us for ever
Until we hear the breeze of talk from the street's secret part,
The eye-lid of the door trembles softly from presumed secret caressing hands,
But the secret caressing hand alas
Deceives the eye-lids of the doors with the phantom of happiness...
Moments and eye-lids are like the lead.
We are two walls,
We are two lofty walls in a narrow street,
We die beside each other and afar from each other,
We are enslaved by the mason of fate.
|
|
|
