Terrestrial Verses

Terrestrial Verses
By: Forough Farrokhzad

Translation by Mohammad Rajabpur

Then
The sun turned cold
And abundance left lands



And in deserts shrubs dried
And in deeps the fish died
And thereafter the earth
Did not receive the dead.
The night in all the pale windows
Was incessantly raging and rebelling
Like a suspicious fancy,
And the roads
Abandoned their ends in the dark.


None thought of love any more
None thought of glory any more
And none
Thought of nothing any more.
In the dens of solitude
Vanity was born,
The blood smelled of opium and hemp,
The pregnant women
Gave birth to headless babies
And the shameful cradles
Took refuge in the graves.
What a bitter and dark time!
Bread had defeated
The miraculous force of prophecy,
Poor hungry prophets
Escaped from divine trysts
And the lost lambs of Jesus
Did not hear the dirge of a shepherd
In the wonder of the desert,
As if in the eyes of the mirrors
Motions, colours and pictures
Reversely were reflected
And as if a sacred shining halo
was burning like an umbrella ablaze
Over the heads of the despised clowns
And over the ugly faces of prostitutes.
The swamps of alcohol
Giving off a poisonous bitter vapor
Drew into their depth
The motionless mass of intellectuals
And the noxious mice
chewed up the gilded pages of books
Preserved in ancient chests.
The sun was dead
The sun was dead, and tomorrow
Was a vague lost concept
In children's mind.



They were drawing
The weirdness of this obsolete word
With a black stain
In their homework.

People,
The lapsed bunch of people
Dejected, dumbfounded and feeble
Were wandering about in exile
Under the evil weight of their corpses
And the painful desire for murder
Was inflating in their hands



Sometimes an insignificant spark
All of a sudden, from within
Shattered this silent lifeless society;
They would attack one another
Men would cut each other's throat
With a dagger
And in a bed of blood
They would sleep with
Immature girls.



They were obsessed with terror
And the scary sense of sinfulness
Had paralyzed
Their blind and stupid souls.
Always during the execution
When the hanging rope
Pushed out
A convict's convulsive eyes
They would be lost in thought
And their old and weary nerves
Would ache of a lustful fancy,
But you would ever see
These small murderers
Standing
And staring at
The constant fall of fountains.


Perhaps still
Behind the crushed eyes
Amidst the chill
There had remained
Something faint and half-alive
In whose breathless effort
Wanted to believe
In the innocence of the song of waters


Perhaps , but what an infinite vacuum!
The sun was dead
And nobody knew
The name of that sad dove
Which has escaped the hearts
Is faith.
O Imprisoned Voice
Can the majesty of thy despair
Ever penetrate into light
Through this disgusting night?
O Imprisoned Voice
The last voice of voices ...