Born Again
One dark word is all I am
uttering you again and again
until you wake where you blossom forever
In this word I breathed you, breathed
and in this word bound you
to trees, water, flame
Life may be
a street she walks down every long day, a basket in her hand
life may be
the rope over the limb he hangs himself with
Life may be a child home from school
Life
may be lighting a cigarette in the languid pause of lovemaking
or
a pedestrian's vacant gaze
as
he tips his hat to another
saying
with his vacant smile. Good morning
Life
may be that sealed moment
when
my game disintegrates in the lens of your eyes
and
the moon
senses
itself in rite, and the darkness
In
a room measured by solitude
my
heart
measured
by love
finds
ordinary excuses for its happiness-
the
lovely lapse of flowers vased
the
sapling you set in our yard
the
canaries cantilena Their singing fills the window
Ah...
This
has fallen to me
This
has fallen to me
This
to me
A
sky a curtain shrouds
The
descent of a broken stair
Marriage
to exile and rot
My
be pacing the sad gardens of memory
Dying sorrowing, a voice saying to me:
I
love your hands
In
the garden I plant my hands
I
know I shall grow, I know, I know
swallows
will by their eggs
in
the nest of my inkstained fingers
Twin
pain of bright cherries
will
be my earrings
and
dahlia petals dress my fingernails
There's
a certain lane
where
boys with the same tousled hair, thin necks and scrawny legs
who
loved me once
still
recall the simple smile of a girl
swept
away one night by the wind
A
certain lane my heart
stole
from my childhood's quarter
A
body travels the line of time
and
a body makes that barren line conceive
a
body that knows the image
returning
from the feast of the mirror
And
that's how
one
dies
how
one lingers on
No
diver will ever fetch a pearl from the well a brooklet drowns in
I
know a sad little nymph
who
lives in the sea
and
plays the wooden flute of her heart
tenderly,
tenderly
Sad
little nymph
dying
at night of a kiss
and by a kiss reborn each day
Forugh Farrokhzad, Bride of Acacias: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad, Jascha Kessler trans. with Amin Banani (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1982)