Poem: Farokhzad: Rebirth

Rebirth

My whole being is a dark mishap
which repeated in itself
will take one to the dawn of creation
growth and eternity…

In this mishap I have sighed Ah!
as one sighs Ah!, in a mishap…
I have linked me to tree to water and fire…
Perhaps life is a long street where each day
a woman passes with a basket…
Life perhaps is a rope with which a man
hangs himself from a limb…
Life is perhaps a child on his way back from school…
Life is perhaps lighting a cigarette
in the tranquil interval between two embraces,
or the casual ritual of a passerby with a vacant smile
and tipped hat greeting another with “G’morning…”
Perhaps life is that incarcerated instant
When my gaze decomposes itself
In the melody of your eyes…

And in this awareness
I shall conjugate with the moon’s insight
and the discovery of the zenith in a room
that has the dimensions of solitude…
My heart, made to measurements of one single love
Wonders at the simple pretexts for its happiness
At the decline of the beauty of flowers in a vase
At the seed you have planted in the flower bed of our house
And at the song of the canaries — infinite as a skylight…

Ah…
This is my destiny.
This is my destiny.
My destiny is the sky that the hanging of a curtain will deny me.
My destiny is the descent on an abandoned stairway
and arrival at an alien somewhere in decay.
My destiny is a mournful stroll in the garden of memory
and in the sorrow of a dying voice that says
I love your hands…

I plant my hands deep in the soil…
They will turn green, I know,
I know I know…
And the swallows will lay eggs in the
palm of my hand with ink soiled fingers…

I hang onto my earrings
of twin red cherries
and on my nails I stick petals of dahlias…
There is a street where
boys who were in love with me
with the same tousled hair and thin necks
and skinny legs still dream of the demure smile of a little girl
whom the wind carried away one night…

There is a street which my heart has robbed
from the neighborhood
of my childhood…

The trip is designed in the line of time
and to make the sterile line of time pregnant with form
a design from a conscious scheme returns
through enticing mirrors…

And this is why
one dies
and another stays.

No fisherman looking into a small river
flowing into a low lying field
will ever fish a pearl.

I know a tiny morose fairy residing in the sea
who gusts her heart into a small reedy flute
humming, slowly, slowly…
Just a small sad fairy
who dies at night after a kiss
and rises at dawn
with a kiss…

———–Farough Farokhzad

Translated by Tatul Sonentz