Farrokh Tamimi

Farrokh Tamimi (1933 in Nishapur – 2003), Modernist Iranian Poet.

Poet

Fare welling Hands

• I saw the fare welling hands,
  They were sickly,
  When my hand
  Touched her cold and long fingers
  Which was from the family of the wailing reed
  It gripped an eternal grief in its fist
  The pen broke
  And pain
  Like black drops of ink
  dropped on our papery hearts.
  I saw the fare welling hands,
  They were sickly;
• Stranger to love and the benevolent
  hand of age......
  History has recorded on our papery hearts
  By the reed
  And each partition of the reed
  Complains of the Masnavi of our groans: ...........??
  The lines in your hands
  (these winding roads)
  Is familiar to my eye.
  Believe me
  The lines in your hand
  Are more familiar to me than my own lines...
  Ah
  O friend...
  They buried us together in the grave
  A thousand years ago,
  

---

• And this is the friendship of centuries and centuries of death.
  We saw the fare welling hands,
  They were sickly.
  It was the hand of age,
  it was the hand of the millennium.
  

The Time of Death

• In a knapsack of bitter life

I

Brought the message of unity from rivers

And the message of separation from winds

As a gift;

In the boundless glorious expanse of thought,

Upon my lofty peak of heart...

A lifetime

I sat alone with myself

Here

In blood,

In fire.

I learned

The big secret of existence,

I learned how to die,

I learned

To record with my own hand

The time of my death.

Alas O ancient reader,

In this narrow cage

You are not conscious;

Your heart

Is beating in the closed fists of strangers;

You are not awake so that I can tell you

How and where you must die.

Farhad

• A dumb halo of sorrow lurks in Shirin's cold gaze,

Reclining on the marble columns of the veranda,

A pregnant cat is sleeping on her lap

And slowly snores.

The Shirin's image north of the garden

Is hanging on an apple tree;

Khosrow, in love with another mistress, mockingly mutters;

How can the eye in this image

Show the trace of lover breathing eye of Shirin?...??

For a moment Khosrow beats at the bow and says:

Shirin's eye is a good target, I have ordained

That this new bow should be tried on it.

Khosrow, the king of the world,

The master of archers,

Pulled out an arrow from his quiver.

This Parthian arrow, this nimble flying hawk,

Is familiar with the bow and the thumb.

A spark rose from Mount Bistoun,

Was it the lightening from Farhad's ax?

An angry flame is blazing in the image's eye,

The loud uproar,

The loud clamor of Farhad's heart,

Is robing sleep from the cat's eye.

The Doors and Walls

• We are two walls,

We are two lofty walls in a narrow street,

The hands of a mason whose name was fate or another thing

Was laying the mud bricks of youth

Over each other and was laughing.

Our youthful hearts

Groaned in the mud of each brick.

We are two walls,

For many years,

Days,

Nights,

We see hasty passersby walking to their business,

Passersby who are talking to each other,

Passersby who are lonely and lonely.

We are two walls and the eye-lid of each gate is shut for us for ever

Until we hear the breeze of talk from the street's secret part,

The eye-lid of the door trembles softly from presumed secret caressing hands,

But the secret caressing hand alas

Deceives the eye-lids of the doors with the phantom of happiness...

Moments and eye-lids are like the lead.

We are two walls,

We are two lofty walls in a narrow street,

We die beside each other and afar from each other,

We are enslaved by the mason of fate.

References

• http://www.farrokhtamimi.org
• ISBN 964-7081-05-7.