Seven Poems by Shams Langeroodi
Translated into English by Nasrin Reshadi
1
Poetry
Is like talking in a dream
At first
It awakens others
Then yourself.
2
RIVER
From dawn to dusk
Tumult of birds
Behind the windows, loggias.
Birds coming
Birds going
Birds dying out
Without feeling their vacancy.
3
SUN
They invaded and shattered a star
And poured its fiery swarf on our hearts
And fled.
Now
Every flake of a star
Becomes a sun
In the galaxy of our hearts.
4
MAGIC
Poetry, like a blue filigree
Must embroider the dress of the world.
Poetry, like a marine basket
Must fetch the pearl of life to the fishermen’s cottage.
Poetry, has to be a tall cypress
Which schoolchildren
Secrete their bags and books
In its shimmering shadow.
A tempest concealed in the breeze
Poetry is the magic of captives’ words
When freedom
Abruptly inflames in a star’s mouth.
It is a molten breeze in the gullet of a starving woman
When sighs:
“You ruined me man.”
Is a luminous sea
The ford of rocks and oil and lumber.
Is a hidden mountain
Thus eluding the invasion of brutes, burglars
Embraces you at a sudden
And you
In its reviving warmth
Are weaving the prettiest necklaces of the starving girls.
Poetry is a form
That is neither found
Nor hidden.
5
Now a thousand roads, dreaming
Now a thousand routes, blooming, mouldering.
Your beauty is the whole
Your beauty is a bird which is swilling my blood
And ruins me.
That immemorial adoration Majnun had
Was the greedy-hearted child of mine
You know
I am the bygone relic of Joseph’s faith
And my soul
Is ruinous than out of your hands.
Stay with me
With me, which all the stars
Flare in me and yet do not disencumber me.
Stay with me
If my love is colossal and wondrous
It is all out of ignorance.
You know
Your beauty is an eagle
Which de-sludges me
And a clock zinging beneath my head
Does not accurately comprehend
The hideous meaning of time.
And death is a present given by God
Before your birth.
6
What an age-long era
I have been waiting for you.
Settle and lustrate me
From the hollow sun’s dust
Which has rained down on me.
What an age-long era
I have been waiting for your hands.
Serener!
This statue of dust
Will collapse
With a fingertip.
Desist me
I want to gaze at you heartily
Heretofore incinerating
Of a sigh’s quiver.
7
The gloom
Is a cluster of black grapes
Tread it
Tread it
Let it remain closed for an hour
This sorrow will inebriate you.
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