Gholamreza Brousan (Dec 13, 1973 – Dec 6, 2011) was an Iranian poet and a recipient of both the Nima Poetry Award and the Journalists’ Poetry Award. During his lifetime, Brousan published poetry collections: The Probability Confuses the Bird (1999) and A Pack of Cigarettes in Exile (2005), Five Love Poems of a Soldier (2008) and Elegy for a Tree Fallen on Its Side (2009), the latter earning him second place in the Nima Poetry Award, and a significant anthology of Mashhad poetry, among some others. Brousan’s final book, A Door Opened in the Waters, comprises poems written in the late 2000s (2008–2010) which was posthumously published by his family after his tragic death along with his wife and their daughter Leila in a car accident on the Quchan road on 4 December 2011.
His poetry is often marked by a taste for novelty, a sense of strangeness, unity with nature, and a deep relation to water, soil, and stone. His poems are imbued with profound human concerns, ranging from peace, grandeur, and war to cultural values such as chivalry, friendship, and kindness. Brousan’s poetry is commonly associated with the movement of simple writing (sādeh-nevisi) in modern Persian poetry. He regarded simplicity not as ease but as a demanding formal discipline, arguing that, unlike hermetic poets, practitioners of simplicity fulfill poetry’s obligation to realism. He described his own work as an instance of sahl-e momtane‘ (deceptively simple —that is, accessible on the surface, yet resistant in depth and confronting the reader with a new sensory experience.
(1)
How can I believe
that only one bullet took you from me?
The river had meant to wrap around your waist,
and the rain was falling
straight on your right hand.
Spring was coming
to take from your right hand
the map of the villages.
You were killed,
and you had to let go of your dream.
They brought the news of your death
and laid it in the middle of the yard
like a cherry branch in full bloom.
(2)
Like a street passing through mist,
twisting into the shadowed hollow of the head,
all life slipped away –
with a lettuce leaf, with her simple smile,
with a basket of apricots beside the waterway,
with mint, and spearmint.
All things depart, however:
We too shall pass –
like a cow sunken in its solitude.
We too shall pass
and leave the glorious season of youth
intact for others.
And this crimson apple still hangs on the branch.
(3)
Your mouth was kind.
Your eyes were wide with graceful lashes,
and your round face shone like the moon’s bowl.
And your feet—seeking me in a corner—
me, like a washer
like a frayed edge of a rug
or “a weary panther.”
Your eyes were kind.
Your mouth was kind.
And sparrows truly came,
drinking water from the corners of your lips.
(4)
Without you
I feel like a desolate wasteland
that even frightens the wind –
a narrow stream
that has seen only a fifth of the moon.
Even the most beautiful pine trees
I see as sorrowful women
mourning over an unmarked grave.
Ah –
loneliness does to me
what termites do to ceilings,
what the moon does to linen,
what heart failure did to Nazim Hikmat.
Sometimes I ponder over my final shirt –
in which death occurs to me.
Ah – my shirt without you.
Ah – my head without you.
Ah – my hand without you.
My hand swoons
at the thought of your hand.
It is ten o’clock,
and the clock hands trace a crooked seven –
two fingers collapsing
toward the left side of the heart.
(5)
I remember you in the highlands,
when the wind wanders,
uprooting a bridge
in a small room, no bigger than a palm,
and a flag that weighs down the fall.
I remember you when the rain falls –
a snail senselessly dampening a leaf.
I remember you in the mist,
as it nears the river
like a bloodstained letter.
And stones try to hide your blood.
(6)
Solitude on a bus is forty-four people
Solitude on a train
A thousand.
I think of you.
There is more sunshine
behind shuttered eyes.
I think of you,
and every day
I smoke as the number of my teeth.
We are like rain,
Drenching one another.
(7)
You do not decease,
like a flag fired upon
by countless soldiers.
Every night, when the wind blows,
you let the moon pass through you.
Within you, I saw a stag’s head,
its antlers still curving toward the highlands,
a fountain, fostering many birds.
How could death
fill only a crater of you?
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