Eleven o’clock, and the curtain falls. The cold wind tears the strands of illusion; The delicate music is lost In the blare of home-going crowds And a midnight paper.
The night has grown martial; It meets us with blows and disaster. Even the stars have turned shrapnel, Fixed in silent explosions. And here at our door The moonlight is laid Like a drawn sword.
What is poetry? Is it a mosaic Of coloured stones which curiously are wrought Into a pattern? Rather glass that’s taught By patient labor any hue to take And glowing with a sumptuous splendor, make Beauty a thing of awe; where sunbeams caught, Transmuted fall in sheafs of rainbows fraught With storied meaning for religion’s sake.
We two, how long we were fool’d, Now transmuted, we swiftly escape as Nature escapes, We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return, We become plants, trunks, foliage, roots, bark, We are bedded in the ground, we are rocks, We are oaks, we grow in the openings side by side, We browse, we are two among the wild herds spontaneous as any, We are two fishes swimming in the sea together, We are what locust blossoms are, we drop scent around lanes mornings and evenings, We are also the coarse smut of beasts, vegetables, minerals, We are two predatory hawks, we soar above and look down, We are two resplendent suns, we it is who balance ourselves orbic and stellar, we are as two comets, We prowl fang’d and four-footed in the woods, we spring on prey, We are two clouds forenoons and afternoons driving overhead, We are seas mingling, we are two of those cheerful waves rolling over each other and interwetting each other, We are what the atmosphere is, transparent, receptive, pervious, impervious, We are snow, rain, cold, darkness, we are each product and influence of the globe, We have circled and circled till we have arrived home again, we two, We have voided all but freedom and all but our own joy.
« Quand une personne a vraiment atteint la capacité de créer, son unique devoir est de manifester cette puissance à l’écart des attentes et des jugements. » (Forough Farrokhzâd (1935-1967)) via Librarie Petite Egypte
Perhaps life is a choked moment where my gaze annihilates itself inside in the pupils of your eyes— ?????I will mingle that sensation with my grasp ?????of the moon and comprehension of darkness.
In a room the size of loneliness, my heart’s the size of love. It contemplates its simple pretexts for happiness: the beauty of the flowers’ wilting in a vase,
the sapling you planted in our garden, and the canaries’ song—the size of a window.
Reborn, Forugh Farrokhzad. Translated By Sholeh Wolpé
Behind his project lay the understanding that social life is “a seamless web, a single inconceivable and transindividual process, in which there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another” Benjamin Kunkel on Fredric Jameson.
No one really dies in the myths. No world is lost in the stories. Everything is lost in the retelling, in being wondered at. We grow up and grow old in our land of grass and blood moons, births and goneness. We live our myth in the recurrence, pretending we will return another day. Like the morning coming every morning. The truth is we come back as a choir. Otherwise Eurydice would be forever in the dark. Our singing brings her back. Our dying keeps her alive.
What things are steadfast? Not the birds. Not the bride and groom who hurry in their brevity to reach one another. The stars do not blow away as we do. The heavenly things ignite and freeze. But not as my hair falls before you. Fragile and momentary, we continue. Fearing madness in all things huge and their requiring. Managing as thin light on water. Managing only greetings and farewells. We love a little, as the mice huddle, as the goat leans against my hand. As the lovers quickening, riding time. Making safety in the moment. This touching home goes far. This fishing in the air.
