Window

Translation below from Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad , translated by Sholeh Wolpé (University of Arkansas Press, 2007).

Window

A window for seeing.

A window for hearing.

A window like a well

that plunges to the heart of the earth

and opens to the vast unceasing love in blue.

A window lavishing the tiny hands of loneliness

with the night’s perfume from gentle stars.

A window through which one could invite 

the sun for a visit to abandoned geraniums.

 

One window is enough for me.

 

I come from the land of dolls, from under 

the shade of paper trees in a storybook grove;

from arid seasons of barren friendships and love

in the unpaved alleys of innocence;

from years when the pallid letters of the alphabet

grew up behind desks of tubercular schools;

from the precise moment children could write

“stone” on the board and the startled starlings took wing

from the ancient tree.

 

I come from among the roots of carnivorous plants,

and my head still swirls with the sound

of a butterfly’s terror— crucified with a pin to a book.

 

When my trust hung from the feeble rope of justice

and the whole city tore my lamps’ hearts to shreds,

when love’s innocent eyes were bound

with the dark kerchief of law, and blood gushed

from my dreams’ unglued temples,

when my life was no longer anything,

nothing at all except the tick tick of a clock on the wall,

I understood that I must, must, must

deliriously love.

 

One window is enough for me.

 

A window to a moment of comprehension, perception, silence.

The walnut sapling has grown tall enough

to tell its leaves the meaning of the wall.

Ask of the mirror the name of your liberator.

Is not the trembling earth beneath your feet

lonelier than you?

The prophets brought the epistles

of ruin to our age.

These explosions without end, 

these poisonous clouds,

are they not the peal of holy scriptures?

O friend, O comrade, O blood brother,

when you reach the moon,

mark the day of the flowers’ massacre.

 

Dreams always fall

from the heights of their own naiveté,

and perish.

 

It’s a four-leaf clover I’m smelling, 

sprouted upon the grave of an archaic creed.

Was the woman buried in the shroud of longing

and chastity, my youth?

Will I ever again climb the stairs of wonder

to greet the good God who paces my roof?

 

I sense that time has passed,

I sense my share of “moments” is now a leaf of history;

I sense this desk is just an illusory mass between

my hair and this forlorn stranger’s hands.

Speak to me.

What does one who offers you a living body’s love

want in return but a nod to her sense of existence?

 

Speak to me.

From the sanctuary of my window

I am intimate with the sun.