Samples of Leila Farjami’s Poetry in English:
1
“for Sohrab and Neda, and all the martyrs of the green movement”
Green Doves
Read: “the house is black”
the bright windows
decompose in dark leprosies,
every day
every day
everyday
today
the sun is not enough of a pretext to live
when they hang your ankles by the rope of their horrors
from the most Eastern alley of the world
and annihilate the last light in your house.
Read:
alas!
They have been our own
the ones who kill
the ones who are killed
those bullets piercing through the square’s radius
and those throats
those throats
those Green doves
who flap their wings for a moment
in the forbidding breath of a morning,
and die
Red.
2
Of cities we’ve built #4
With walls of wax
and roofs of hay
we’ve erected homes,
birds of ceramic
on plastered branches,
and we built a city
in the circle of a Sun
unseen
with rays of light
unfathomed,
we built
and built
and built
and yet
plunged it all in fire
into the abysmal Sun.
3
Geomancy
And I learned the constellations
from a white-clad woman
in the night she became moon
lost in the sky.
And I have been the dark half
between the five slender fingers of God
like a cracked ball rolling in the geomancy
of a brief circle.
And I have been a reckless spell
in the hands of a turned sorcery.
The truth is of all the lies
I have become one
whose name
has infinitely escaped my memory.
4
The Misfit
With roots of water
leaves of cloud,
my soul is a tree
a misfit for this earth:
like a bird fumbling
on shattered glass.
