Another Birth

Kourosh Bahar
November 2018

Another Birth

by Forough Farrokhzad
(translated from Farsi)

My whole being
Is a dark verse
That’ll carry you
Endlessly repeating inside
To the dawn tide of blossoming
And never-ending births

In this verse
With my sigh
I have released you

Ah

In this verse
I have joined you
To the verdant wood
To water and fire

Life perhaps
Is a long stretching road
Whereon every day
A woman with her basket
Passes by

Life perhaps
Is a cord
By whose aid
From a branch
A man suspends himself

Life perhaps
Is a child
Returning from school

Life perhaps
Is lighting a smoke
In the languorous stretch
From one carnal embrace to another

Or the absentminded passage of a man
With a senseless smile who lifts his hat
And to a passerby says “good morning”

Life perhaps is the obstructing moment
That my gaze meets the dark of your eyes
And gives in to her ruin

And in this is a sensation
I’ll commingle with the perception of the moon
And the receiving of the dark

In a room that’s the size of one’s loneliness
My heart that’s the size of one love
Surveys its simple reasons for happiness
And observes
The beautiful withering of the flowers in the pot,
The sapling you planted in our garden
And the canaries who sing to one window’s measure

O
This is my lot
This is my lot
My lot is a sky
That can be taken from me
By the drop of a curtain

My lot
Is a descent down
An abandoned stairwell
And clinging
To something in decay
And alienation

My lot is a melancholy wandering
In the garden of memories
And the despair of dying
In a voice that tells me:
“I love your hands”

I plant my hands in the garden
I will take root and grow
I know, I know, I know
And the swallows will lay their eggs
In the hollow of my ink-stained fingers

Earrings made of twin cherries
I’ll let fall from both ear
And paste petals of dahlia to my nails

There’s an alley
Where the boys in love with me
With their ruffled hair, slender necks
And skinny legs still recall
The young girl’s innocent smile
And the night the wind snatched her away

There is an alley
My heart has stolen
From the places of my childhood

A form’s travel through linear time
With another form
Impregnates the dry strand of time
A form, fully aware of the picture
Returns from the mirror’s feast

And that is how one dies
And one remains

No hunter finds pearls in a trickling stream
That empties into a ditch

I know a sad little mermaid
Who lives in an ocean somewhere
And sings her heart into a wooden flute
Softly, Softly

The sad little mermaid
That dies in the night after one kiss|
And by dawn
Is reborn with another

© 2018 Translation, Kourosh Bahar

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Kourosh Bahar is an Iranian-born American artist, based in New York.