zan zendegi azadi - Woman Life Freedom

My whole being is a dark verse

That, repeating you in itself

will carry you to the dawn of eternal blossoming and growth

I sighed you in this verse, ah

in this verse I

grafted you to tree, water, and fire

Life is perhaps

a long street through which a woman with a basket passes every day

Life is perhaps

a rope with which a ma hangs himself form a branch

Life is perhaps a child returning from school

Life is perhaps lighting a cigarette in the languid repose between two love/makings

or the confused passerby

who tips his hat

and with a meaningless smile says to another passerby ‘Good morning’

Life is perhaps that closed moment

when my gaze destroys itself in the pupils of your eyes

and in this there is a feeling

that I will mingle with the perception of the moon and the conception of darkness

In a room which the size of one loneliness

my heart

which the size of one love

looks at is simple pretexts for happiness

at the beautiful withering flowers in the vase

at the sapling that zou have planted in the garden of our house

and at the song of canaries

that 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 takes away from me

My lot is descending an abandoned stair

and joining something in decay and exile

My lot is a melancholy excursion in the garden of memories

and dying in the sorrow of a voice that tells me>

‘I love

your hands’

I plant my hands in the garden

I will grow, I know, I know, I know

and swallows will lay eggs

in the hollows of my ink-stained fingers

I hang earrings on my two ears

made of two red twin cherries

and I stick dahlia petals on my nails

There is an alley where

boys who were in love with me, still

with the same dishevelled hair and thin necks and boney legs

think of the innocent smiles of a little girl whom one night

the wind carried away

There is an alley which my heart

has stolen away from the neighborhoods of my childhood

The journey of a form on the line of time

And impregnating the dry line of time with a form

A form conscious of an image

That returns form the feast of a mirror

And thus it is

That someone dies

And someone remains

No hunter will find a pearl in a shallow stream that pours into a small ditch

I

Know a sad little fairy

Who lives in an ocean

and plays her heart on a wooden flute

softly, softly

a sad little fairy

who dies of a kiss at night

and is born of a kiss at dawn

M.R. Ghanoonpoor. ‘Alien Rebirths of ‘Another Birth,’ in Forugh Farrokhzad: Poet of Modern Iran, Iconic Woman and Feminine Pioneer of New Persian Poetry, ed. Dominic Parviz Brookeshaw and Nasrin Rahimieh (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 176-178.