Poems and Translations
Translations by Sholeh Wolpé <Back To Poems Home Page
Poem by: Forugh Farrokhzad
Translated by: Sholeh Wolpé
I Pity the Garden
No one thinks of the flowers.
No one thinks of the fish.
No one wants to believe the garden is dying,
that its heart has swollen in the heat of this sun,
that its mind drains slowly of its lush memories.
Our garden is forlorn.
It yawns waiting
for rain from a stray cloud,
and our pond sits empty.
Callow stars bite the dust
from atop tall trees
and from the pale home of the fish
comes the hack of coughing every night.
Our garden is forlorn.
Father says: My time is past, my time is past.
I’ve carried my burden.
I’m done with my work.
He stays in his room from dawn to dusk,
reads History of Histories or Ferdowsi’s Epic of Kings.
Father says to Mother:
Damn every fish and every bird!
When I’m dead, what will it matter
if the garden lives or dies.
My pension is all that counts.
Mother’s life is a rolled out prayer rug.
She lives in terror of Hell,
always seeks Sin’s footprints in every corner,
imagines the garden sullied
by the sin of a wayward plant.
Mother is a sinner by nature. She prays
all day, then with her “consecrated” breath
blows on all the flowers, all the fish
and all over her own body.
She awaits the Promised One
and the forgiveness He is to bring.
My brother calls the garden a graveyard.
He laughs at the plight of the grass
and ruthlessly counts the corpses of the fish
rotting beneath shallow water’s dead skin.
My brother is addicted to philosophy.
He sees the healing of the garden in its death.
Drunk, he beats his fists on doors and walls,
says he is tired, pained and despondent.
He carries his despair everywhere,
just as he carries his birth certificate,
diary, napkin, lighter, and pen.
But his despair is so small that each night
it is lost in crowded taverns.
My sister was a friend to flowers.
She would take her simple heart’s words
--when mother beat her --
to their kind and silent gathering,
and sometimes she would treat the family
of fish to sunshine and cake crumbs.
She now lives on the other side of town
in her artificial home, and in the arms
of her artificial husband she makes natural children.
Each time she visits us, if her skirt is sullied
with the poverty of our garden
she bathes herself in perfume.
Every time she visits she is with child.
Our garden is forlorn.
Our garden is forlorn.
All day from behind the door
come sounds of cuts and tears,
sounds of blasts.
Instead of flowers, our neighbors plant
bombs and machine guns in their garden soil.
They cover their ponds, hiding bags of gunpowder.
The school children fill their backpacks
with tiny bombs.
Our garden is dizzy.
I fear the age that has lost its heart,
the idleness of so many hands
the alienation in so many faces.
I am like a schoolchild madly in love
with her geometry books.
I am forlorn
and imagine it is possible to take the garden to a hospital.
I imagine I imagine
And the garden’s heart has swollen in the heat
of this sun, its mind slowly drains of its lush memories.
From Sin--Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad
