In memory of Mitra Pejman... KB

Friend                                                    ~ Sohrab Sepehri 


                          “I should be glad of another death”   ~T.S. Eliot

[She] was

A Great One

And of our time

And intimately linked to every open horizon

And understood so well the language of water and the earth

With her voice a grief-stricken distress call of the Real

And eyelids that traced the path to every elemental heartbeat

And hands that turned the pages of the clear skies of bounty

Flocking compassion to our door…

Formed in the likeness of her own solitude

She conveyed to the mirror

The most love-laden sliver of her moments

And as rain

She filled up with a continual rejuvenation

And like a tree

She multiplied manifold within the munificence of light

She always called after the childhood of the wind

She always tied the strands of spoken words to the latch of water

One night

She elucidated the evergreen prostrations

Of loving kindness so clearly

That we caressed the faithful surface of the soil

And in the words of a pail

Were transfigured into refreshing water

And many times did we not witness

With how many baskets

She ventured forth to pluck the vine of glad tidings

But she never stood in the way

Of the clarity of the doves

And went forth to the edge of oblivion

And laid down to rest past the tolerance of light

And she never thought

That in the articulation of these anxious doorways

We would remain so utterly alone

In the consumption of a single apple

---

Note: The original poem is written in the third-person and in Farsi the third-person is not gender specific; however as this poem is generally considered to have been written in memory of ForoughFarrokhzad, I have opted for “she” & “her” in my translation.

 
                                                                                                                                     © 2014 Translated by Kourosh Bahar