Three Poems from Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

"That which is the real beloved is not a form / whether it is love for this world or that next world," Rumi writes in the Masnavi, emphasizing the primacy of the divine beloved over its earthly counterpart. The love object — moon-faced, rosebud-lipped, sublimely unattainable — of the Sufi poet's odes (ghazals) functions as a vector through which to express an ecstatic love for God. The Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad (1934 – 1967) is so often described as a "rebel" or "iconoclast" poet in part, it seems, because her poetic dispatches come from this wretched world of forms — in her writing, the vector for divine love, the love object, asserts its own subjectivity. "The journey of a form along the line of time / a form impregnating the barren line of time / a form conscious of an image / that returns from a feast in a mirror," she writes. Farrokhzad, like many Persian writers influenced by Nima Yushij's mid-20th century New Poetry movement, reconsiders the Sufi devotional tradition, wherein self-indulgences like feasting on one's own image in a mirror were thought only to tarnish the mirror of the soul, thereby dimming its reflection of divine light. Among the ghazal's recurring themes is the sorrowful longing for the beloved (gham), which was traditionally meant only as an obstacle during the journey toward self-renunciation, a journey culminating in the obtention of the ecstatic mystical state. Farrokhzad, however, speaks as a form hewn to the "line of time," trapped in the earthly realm — her sorrowful longing is one of disillusionment given the unrealizability of divine ecstasy. She laments, "— Love / — It is alone and from a low window looks out at deserts missing Majnūn," referring to Nizami Ganjavi's epic love poem Layla & Majnūn, in which the thwarted lover wanders the desert, spouting poems for his beloved Layla, ultimately uniting with her in death. 

The themes of entrapment, monotony, barrenness, of being encased within one's form, are visually expressed in Farrokhzad's short film The House Is Black (1962), which centers on the inhabitants of a leper colony in Azerbaijan, and throughout which Farrokhzad reads her poetry in voiceover. "The universe is pregnant with inertia / and has given birth to time," she recites over footage of a child being carried through the colony in a creaking wheelbarrow. Elsewhere, a patient paces the length of a hospital wall, over and over, while Farrokhzad faintly recites the days of the week. The House Is Black is often interpreted as an allegorical representation of the state of pre-revolution Iran, when its people were caught in Mohammed-Reza Shah Pahlavi's increasingly tight stranglehold and were, like the patients depicted in the film, inculcated with religious doctrine that failed to alleviate their suffering. Farrokhzad's poetry is very much in concert with the committed poetry of her time — her frustration with the regime and its repressive ideology is on stark display in "God's Rebellion," in which she envisions a furious God lashing out at humanity, "driv[ing] the flock of pious ones / out of the green debauched pasture of Heaven" before descending to Hell and making love to Satan. The irreverent and openly sexual content of Farrokhzad's writing, its bold representation of the earthly self, of present misery, and of religious hypocrisy have cemented her reputation as "feminist icon" and "dissident writer," labels only reinforced when reading her work amid the present Mahsa Amini protests. Though Farrokhzad is a supremely effective and emboldening dissident poet, such labeling and narrativizing of her short and turbulent life can, I'd argue, do a disservice to her deft and haunting verse. The fullest experience of Farrokhzad's genius can be achieved not by reading her words for political messaging or for allusions to her highly-publicized trysts, but by fully giving oneself over to her mental landscapes and by relishing her hard-won subjectivity, which she draws out in vividly cinematic detail, her consciousness taking on physical dimensions: "In a room the size of a loneliness / my heart / the size of a love / looks for simple excuses for happiness."

—Mia Ruf

God's Rebellion 

عصيان خدا  Osyān-e Khodā 

If I were God one night I would order the angels
to drop the sun’s disk into the furnace of darkness
In anger, I would order the caretakers of the universe
to pick the moon’s yellow leaf from the branch of night 

At midnight, behind the veils of my grand palace
the hand of my roaring rage would turn the world upside down
After thousands of years of silence my tired hands
would cast down the mountains into the open mouth of the sea 

I would unchain the feet of thousands of feverish stars
I would scatter the fire’s blood in the silent veins of the forests
I would tear the veils of smoke so that in the wind’s roar
the daughter of fire may dance drunk in the depth of the forests 

On a flute I would blow a spell like the night wind
so that the rivers, tired of a life sluicing wet channels
would rise from their beds like thirsty snakes and pour down
into the heart of the night sky’s dull marsh 

Softly I would tell the winds to launch, on the river of feverish night
the small skiff drunk on the roses’ perfume
I would open the graves so that thousands of wandering souls
could once again conceal themselves inside bodies 

If I were God, one night I would order the angels
to boil the water of Heaven’s river in the furnace of Hell
and, burning torch in hand, to drive the flock of pious ones
out of the green debauched pasture of Heaven 

Weary of zealous restraint, at midnight, in Satan’s bed
I would seek shelter in the descent to a fresh sin
I would choose instead of the golden crown of divinity
the dark and painful pleasure of sin’s embrace 

In a Never-Ending Twilight 

در غروبی ابدی   Dar Ghorūbī Abadī 

—Day or night?
—No, O friend, it is a never-ending twilight
with two pigeons passing by on the wind
like two white coffins
and voices from far away, from that alien field
vagrant and wavering, like the wind 

◊◊ 

—Something must be said
Something must be said
I crave to be one with darkness
Something must be said 

What a deep amnesia
An apple falls from the branch
Yellow grains of flax seeds break
in the beaks of my lovesick canaries
The fava's flower yields its blue tendrils to the intoxicating breeze
so as to escape
the vague anxiety of change
And here, in me, in my head?

Ah . . .
There is nothing in my head except the whirling of tiny thick red
  particles
and my gaze
is like a lie
downcast and ashamed 

—I am thinking of a moon
—I, of a word in a poem
—I am thinking of a spring
—I, of an illusion in the soil
—I, of the rich scent of a wheat field
—I, of a fairytale about bread
—I, of the innocence of games
and of that long narrow alleyway
filled with the perfume of the acacia trees
—I, of the bitter awakening after a game
and of the bewilderment after the alleyway
and of the endless emptiness after the perfume of the acacias 

◊◊ 

—Heroics?
—Ah
The horses are old
—Love?
—It is alone and from a low window looks out
at deserts missing Majnūn
at pathways that vaguely recall
a delicate ankle’s languid walk, its anklets 

—Desires?
—They give up
at the merciless coordination of thousands of doors
—Shut?
—Yes, always shut, shut
—You will get tired 

—I am thinking of a house
with the breathing of its ivy, indolent,
with its lights, like the pupil of an eye
with its pensive nights, lazy, at ease
and of a newborn with boundless smiles
like concentric circles on the water
its body plump with blood, like a cluster of grapes
—I am thinking of its collapse
and the looting by black gusts
and of a suspicious light
that at night searches into the window
and of a small grave, small as a newborn 

—Work . . . work?
—Yes, but in that big desk
lives a secret enemy
who gnaws at you very slowly
as it does the wood and the notebook
and thousands of other useless things
and in the end, you will sink in a cup of tea
like a boat in a whirlpool
and on the farthest horizon see nothing
but thick cigarette smoke
and incomprehensible lines 

—A star?
—Yes, hundreds, hundreds, but
all on the far side of the walled-in nights
—A bird?
—Yes, hundreds, hundreds, but
all in distant memories
flapping their wings with useless pride
—I am thinking of a cry in the alleyway
—I, of a harmless mouse in the wall
that once in a while scrabbles by 

◊◊ 

Something must be said
Something must be said
in the dawn, in the trembling moment that space
like the sensation of puberty
mixes suddenly with something vague
I want
to surrender to a rebellion
I want
to rain from that big cloud I want
to say   No   No   No   No 

—Let’s go
—Something must be said
— The cup, or the bed, or loneliness, or sleep?
—Let’s go. . . . 

Another Birth 

تولدی دیگر  Tavallodī Dīgar 

My whole being is a dark verse
that by repeating you in itself
will carry you to the dawn of eternal blossoming and growth
In this verse I sighed you
ah, in this verse
I grafted you to tree and water and fire 

◊◊ 

Maybe life
is a long street in which every day a woman with a basket passes by
Maybe life
is a rope with which a man hangs himself from a branch
Maybe life is a young child coming home from school 

Maybe life is lighting a cigarette in the languid pause between making
love and making love again
or the distracted gait of a passer-by
who lifts his hat from his head
and with a meaningless smile says to another passer-by, “Good morning” 

Maybe life is that enclosed moment
in which my gaze annihilates itself in the pupils of your eyes
and in this there is a feeling that I will mix
with the moon’s understanding and the acceptance of darkness 

In a room the size of a loneliness
my heart
the size of a love
looks for simple excuses for happiness
to the beautiful wilting of the flowers in the vase
to the sapling you planted in the garden of our house
and to the song of the canaries
who sing the size of a window 

Ah . . .
This is my lot
This is my lot
My lot
is a sky that the pulling of a curtain takes away from me
My lot is to descend an abandoned stairway
and join something rotting and in exile
My lot is a walk stained with grief in the garden of memories
and to die grieving for the voice that says to me
“I love
your hands” 

I bury my hands in the garden
I will grow, I know, I know, I know
and swallows will lay their eggs
in the hollow of my ink-stained fingers 

I hang twin red cherries
over my ears as earrings
and stick dahlia petals on my fingernails
There is an alleyway where
the boys who were in love with me
with the same tousled hair and skinny necks and spindly legs
are still thinking of the innocent smiles of a girl who was carried away
one night
by the wind 

There is an alleyway that my heart
has stolen from the neighborhoods of my youth 

The journey of a form along the line of time
a form impregnating the barren line of time
a form conscious of an image
that returns from a feast in a mirror 

And thus it is
that someone dies
and someone remains 

◊◊ 

No fisherman will find a pearl in the humble stream that pours into a pit 

I
know a sad little fairy
who lives in an ocean
and plays her heart out softly, softly
on a pennywhistle
a sad little fairy
who dies with a kiss at night
and is born with a kiss at dawn

Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by Forough Farrokhzad, translated from the Persian by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. is published by New Directions and available now.