Four Springs

Translation by Niloufar Talebi, 2004
www.thetranslationproject.com
Translation©NiloufarTalebi2004

Eruption

Yellow silk cocoon,
Butterfly flaps fluttering
Disheveled hair, bare feet
The little girl
Sets out in the breeze
Children flittering
And lost games linger in afternoon haze.
Where is that twelve-year-old girl?
With my dolls and jump ropes
And cardboard house
And a drop of blood
A veil between childhood
And puberty’s dawn.

Bursting

Bashful, clinging to childhood,
She bathes her breast-buds
In morning dew.
She is a budding spring
A sudden pageantry of green.
She averts her eyes from her beloved
But the thumping of her heart
Is audible even through a storm.
The almond blossom
Brushes the sixteen-year-old girl
As does the here and now of love
My lustrous skin.

Issuing

How it burns
Dagger gouging, skin pins and needles
A thousand
Blows on the bones
Half-conscious and torn asunder.
Push, push, push
She claws at the sheets,
Those mercurial clouds shift.
Bright wet hallucinations and dry
Tongue stuck to palate.
Pressure, pain, perishing...
An impatient child
Escapes the uterine strait.
My howls drown my nineteenth year.
In one instant
My creation assigns its pain to me.

Blossoming

Forty nine-year-old
Is not wary of phobic
Fuddy-duddy chitter-chatter.
Time spins
In a frenzy of repollination
And the ray of light
Emanating from my soul
Releases me from
Decadent superstition
And wrath.
Ecstatic in yet-springing-anew
Finally wise to seasoned love
Menopause*, this Change of Life
Fights an uphill battle
For this old shrub of a heart
Has never before blossomed so red.

From Selseleh Bar Dast Dar Borj e Eghbaal (With Chained Hands in this House of Fortune) 2004
Chaahar Rouyesh©Partow Nooriala2004

* In Farsi, the word for Menopause also means annulment and/or despair.