Dick Davis 

Translator

I was Knocked up and made pregnant

By a right-wing political bore

When the dust had settled he’d left me

As if I were a whore

An artist signed my belly

He was a real celebrity

He took a selfie with my tears,

Planted a kiss on my misery

The lefties shouted “Abort it!”

Their hammer and sickle attacked me,

The placards in their bloody hands

Were claiming that they backed me

The feminists gave me an essay

About what some big-shot has done

Spit on his sex-obsessed mind

Not a mind but a pond full of scum

“Hey bitch, the word’s in an uproar…”

My mom declares, “Your life's ok,

Call her ’Nazanin Zahra’,

But you're a disgrace- Enough’s enough, I say!”

I’m a painting, a ditch

The woman in each picture, more or less

Like a spot of blood in the toilet

Like Iran on the map, colourless

Gently I’ll take them off

All the things on my body, my clothes,

A few arsenals of arms, gunpowder,

There’s a battlefield under my blouse

Naked, like the first time

naked, like a knife that's bleeding

Naked, in front of your eyes

Like the forbidden poem you're reading

Gently I’ll take them off

The books in each bookcase

The killed heroes will rise in my soul

Triumphantly in place

"Hafez’s" and "Eliot’s" infamous eyes

Weary "Samsa’s" hardened claws

Sex with "Don Quixote", "Ali Baba",

And rape as a matter of course

My skin’s a book cover that's torn,

A book of woes, I’m scarcely alive,

Our whole world’s an underground

Like "Slaughterhouse-Five"

My joy is nothing but footnotes,

My happiness mislaid in sorrow

"365 Nights of Sodom"

365 days of torture

Come on, pour paraffin in my mouth

Come on, set fire to the library-

Blow up all my sulks and moods

And vent your fatigue on my body

They had to remove it and off we went:
A transparent image of bones chained together;
Half face, three-quarters, full face of the fingers stretched out,
     fingers without recognizable lines,
isolated, evading the purpose of the camera, its direct focus.

In their search for obstinate glass shards, the surgeons behead the whorls.
Now I’m thinking about that last border, 
How the maps of beheaded whorls
triumphantly helped me cross.
Under the surgeons’ scalpel my hand is dreaming.
Stopped as an “unrecognized alien.”
The lines were faded,
So was my identity.
That unfeeling mass of muddled stitches on my middle finger
Offended the border official.

These lights have kept my eyes wide open
how many hours?
I haven’t forgotten my name
But the nurse doesn’t believe me.
English has gone loose in my mouth,
It overflows, a child who wets herself. 
The nurse asks my name again,
we all suffer from stuttering, I say.
A finger, a radiology image, 
border officers, identification machines.
I tell her my name,
she doesn’t hear me,
I cannot see my finger. 
Light’s reflection on the layers of white bandage blinds me.
Your finger is as it should be, she says.

translated by Fatemeh Shams and Leonard Schwartz



- - - - - - alternative translation - - - - -

Fingers at the Border

[In the Operating Room]

The transparent image of bones chained together from each corner;
Half face, three quarters face, full face of the fingers that are stretched out more than in reality, fingers without any recognizable lines,
secluded, they evaded the camera’s purpose, its direct focus.

In their search for obstinate recalcitrant glass shards, the surgeons behead the whorls
I’m thinking of the last border, when the intertwined whorls on the tip of my fingers triumphantly helped me cross.

Now how is life going to be with these beheaded, chaotic whorls?

These dates, these reminders are good for nothing, when no way is left to touch them
with this unfeeling mass, these muddled stitches, that struggle to bring my flesh and veins and skin together,
From this angle it’s not possible to write with any confidence
I have to change places
Under the surgeons’ scalpel my hand has gone sleep and is dreaming

I remember a traveling glass splinter that sometimes walked under my skin,
that wandered, and waved, and went off till tomorrow.


[In the Recovery Room]

These long wide lights have kept my eyes wide open
I try to make the nurse understand that I haven’t forgotten my name
English has gone loose in my mouth, it’s brimful, it overflows, like a child who wets herself out of fear. I say to the nurse, “absurdity and stitches are similar, they both stitch the voids together”.
She asks my name again
I say, “We all suffer from stuttering: a finger, a radiology image, stitches, border officers, identification machines”.
Then, I tell her my name.
And raise my right hand; the light’s reflection on the layers of the white bandage blinds me.
My finger is as it should be. 

Your silent body, in memory’s vast sea,
Amid nightmare, at night, your warmth embracing me
Going to the mountain’s heart until the night is leaving
To the poems filled with exile and with grieving
Night of snow, of cold, of when tomorrow won’t appear
Night of sitting up awake, night of When will you be here?
A night of wanting you till dawn, of feverish entreaty
Of you not being here, that so little of you’s left to me,
And reaching out for God in all of this futility
Drink and drugs… not getting there, not helping me,
In bed, and filled with pain, amid love-making you appear
In men’s or women’s arms you’re always, always here
Getting used to forgetting your eyes
Relieved I’m done with you, making sure love dies
Travelling from your dark city that’s death’s competitor
Cloud upon cloud, and a leafless garden there
In the garden’s midst the hands of time are rotten  
The city remembered in autumn’s golden memory is rotten

The hell with it that you’re not here, and that I want you here
The hell with it that you want to be here, and I don’t want you here!

Three empty chairs
One for you
One for me
one for the interrogator
One that must have you opposite me
Or me opposite you
What difference does it make who is opposite who
When for years our only business was running away from the night and breaking in one another’s arms
Or patching up our innumerable separations with kisses.

Three empty chairs
One for silence
One for continuing that silence
One for breaking those two silences
Which it was agreed would set free the sound of the cry of you in me
Or my scream in you
What difference does it make when your voice’s temperature
At every shape of the night
Or every shape of the day
Blazed blazed blazed
Behind my ear
Like the blaze that they are supposed to plant in my heart.

You are chained to the chair
I, to your eyes and sealed mouth
And they, to their sick dreams of our entangled bodies
With or without each other.

I come from a town of beheaded closed cafés
from a town of latticed houses
from a town whose old execution square is now called
     Martyrs’ Square
from the meeting place of cigarette smoke and angels’ wings
they’ve named the barracks The Resting Place
which makes no reference to the Restlessness of the Sentries
polluted by two strands of a woman’s hair
two strands!
I come from the town of stubborn singers
from the place of my own martyrdom
Mashhad.

Pictures don't lie
I’ve grown old
and I’ve forgotten the love I felt when I was twenty
you’ve come too late
paper’s grown expensive
postmen have had enough
planes mostly crash
and no one else’s file will ever be closed.

I was in love with men
whom I never knew
My poems were always about men who walked by me,
who passed by alone, in the rain,
the rain that gave off a smell of burned acorns.
I was in love with men
who always died young,
very young.
Their eyes, in their last moments,
would suddenly become ashen.
These men,
none of them,
ever,
had lips
and their chests
were like misshapen twisted cubes
that no woman’s image could bring peace to.

With poetry and passion, with fire and night,
I created you
With moments of drunkenness, with feverish delight,
I created you
With empty hands, with glasses filled with wine,
Inch by inch, and with my own soul’s light
I created you
Your marvelous name’s known always, everywhere,
Like God Himself, without a title and outright,
I created you
With soil from Tus,* with music and with joy,
There, where the sun reproves the night,
I created you
Crazy for your accent that’s born from Khorasan
With the sweet taste of kisses, with lips that unite,
I created you
Silent, you came at night, my desert filled with stars,
For no reason at all, with no words I can write,
I created you



________________

_{* Tus is an ancient city near Mashhad in Khorasan, Iran
The revered tenth-century Persian poet Abolqasem Ferdowsi,
author of The Shahnameh, was born there.}

The loss of a person’s worth, his future lost in those seas,
The loss of the boat of a child of refugees

The loss of a doll’s hand in the depths of the ocean,
In the depths of its death-filled profundities

The loss of a step on the way to the mountains
The luckless at the borders, the loss of all kindnesses

Two burned wings are little enough from the world to have,
Migratory birds, with no visas overseas

Migratory birds on the way to nowhere, birds
Scattered and lost in nowhere’s immensities

Their backpacks are empty of spring and of laughter
Their backpacks are heavy with pain, uneasy anxieties

Homeland is a sad past with no end
Homeland: the heart-breaking loss of the refugees.

When they broke down the door I was in your arms
Like a freezing cold lullaby curled in your ear

When they broke down the door you gripped me tightly,
I was the clothes on your body, on that night filled with fear

Beneath their kicks and their curses you were naked and I
   was naked
I was your body, dripping blood, unconscious, my dear

You fell, and your calm gaze faltered and failed,
As though I were something you’d forgotten, year after year

When they took you I was a grief-stricken cry,
A silent sea where your fabulous creatures appear

I was a sadness cracked open, calm in the midst
Of your file that was folded now, smudged and nuclear

And though they have hanged you, in memory’s
Image, I see myself there, in your arms, my dear.