when I had to flee barefoot, when I've lost even the roof over my head,
my husband in a dark valley,
my sons entrusted
one to the Tigris,
the other to the Euphrates,
where, then, is Home?
Other than in the corner of my memory
in that ruined halo which - clapped out, collapsing, quiet
from those twisting, turning roads - you carry
half in your heart
half on your back.
*
In the Depths of Time
The autumn rains rained and rained
and water pooled in the space between days.
The birds, the cypress trees,
the moonlit horses
and the crimson leaves, born into heat, all drowned.
In the darkness, words burst like silver bubbles
but the face of the moon had not a mark upon it.
Love had been washed away
and the soul, hoarder of memories, was an emptiness
between green borders.
Now, all that comes to me
is a misty road
and the endless journeying of a woman
whose jagged body
was held back
by invisible ties,
a rope ladder of despair.
I didn't know
that from so many words,
from all that green,
from songs and dreams,
only a thread would remain
to hold us steady
on this ledge, slippery with rain,
where we bend down amongst drowned pigeons
and sea creatures to look,
lassitude, a lump in the throat.
*
Spring
Ah, wind, did you breeze past
the streets of Halabja, Khorramshahr and Karbala?
Have the date palms blossomed there yet?
In Baghdad many children didn't last long enough
to wear their first pair of shoes
and toddle with their mothers down Al Hamid road,
to long for lollipops
or clockwork dolls.
In Abadan, there are no babies in the cradles,
no green gardens,
no balconies lit up with eglantine.
If that little olive-skinned boy from the port were here
he would be a man by now, tall with jet-black hair,
he might have fallen in love,
read books,
built a house,
the wind might have tapped at his door,
but, our lady, the Spring,
each year, at the promised hour, she returns,
to slip through a thousand glassy gates,
the galloping clouds aflame at her heels,
she always comes back
sometimes with death at her breast,
skirts singed by war,
face stained with mud,
gunpowder, the stink of petroleum,
she returns to use again
all that she unpicked from last year,
sewing, in every nook and cranny, in cerulean thread,
the image of a bird -
pain, like a green stone, in place of its eyes
and a wound where its beak should be,
so it can sing out its scarlet song.
*
The Boat that Brought Me
Behind these eyes that look like mine
old names are fading away,
the past lies crumpled in my clenched fist -
a coppery bird in coppery wind,
this vast place has covered me from head to toe.
I am not stripped of word and thought
but sometimes what I want to say gets lost
like a moon smudged with cloud, or when I splutter on a drink.
My tongue trips up when I speak of that journey
though the blood in my veins felt the truth of death.
As I traced my footsteps through the tracery of my old language
Summer whispered to me
my frozen fingers began to put out shoots
and I began to love the cold ebb and flow of tides.
Sometimes I miss
the boat that brought me here,
now that I am witness to the icy eyes of a Swedish winter
under these tired old clouds,
while that suitcase still holds a patch of the sky-blue me.
Contents List
Introduction
Red Bicycle
Night Demon
The Lost
Glaucoma
With a Red Flower
Negative of a Group Photograph
Homeless
Prison
Freedom
In the Depths of Time
But
A Panorama
Letter
Every Tangled Branch
Snow
Words
That Which Once I Was
Poem
Happy Valentine
The First Rains of Spring
Hypnosis Session at Dr Calgari's Surgery
Everywhere
Crow's Final Frontier
Spring
When Winter Comes
Moon
The Boat that Brought Me
A Glimpse
Compass
I Unfolded the Earth
About the Authors
Related Audio
A chilly poem: ‘Snow’ by the wonderful Iranian poet, Azita Ghahreman, who now lives in exile in snowy Sweden. The seemingly endless snow is a metaphor for the hopelessness the poet feels – she and her lover are lost in its vastness. Only ‘a single stray earring’ can be seen – ‘not a tree, not a rabbit, not a star’. If you enjoy this podcast and would like to support the work of the Poetry Translation Centre then please visit poetrytranslation.org/support-us
Azita introduces the poem in English then reads the original in Persian before Maura reads her English translation.
