For one of the greatest poets of the twentieth Century,
Ahmad Shamlou
You are bold,
Shameless,
Demanding,
Anxious
You are curious,
Talkative,
Aggravating,
Eager to meet the neighbors
You are a nuisance,
A worrying type,
Obsessed with closed doors
Restless to stick your head in when they half open,
And talk to whoever is behind them.
Did you memorize entire dictionaries
when you needed words?
Did you stay up through the night
to live longer?
Did you wear glasses
to see better in the dark?
You catch that drop of rain,
That slips through the hole in the aged shingles.
You see the sparrow
Dashing around the blue above the yard,
Landing by mistake on the broken branch,
And falling
almost
into the pond below
You laugh at the silly ghost
Sticking his head in the door you forgot to close to stir up your fears
You don’t run!
Just laugh it out of your anxious dreams.
Yet the ghosts, the sparrows, the broken shingles
And the moments that fall through the cracks
They all shake you to the core
As quakes shake simple unsuspecting villages in Gujarat
You let them take you by storm.
Then savor the encounter,
The bruise,
The surprise in the echo of your own voice:
“It is never the same from one moment to the next!”
And you howl, simply howl like a wounded wolf
When you are angry
You are a poet,
You alter the world!
February 11, 2001