“Let love be your feature”

Mandela
My eternal man
Mandela
My eternal man

The scent of your breath
The scent of freedom
O, Mandela
Your eyes have the color of freedom
O, Mandela

The scent of your breath
The scent of freedom
O, Mandela
My eternal man

Your hand is the flag of freedom
Freedom
Freedom
O, flower,  your name is the symbol of freedom

Tulips
Meadow saffrons
Seek your scent
And red poppies ask you:
“Where is the freedom”
The beloved Mandela

Our eternal man
Our eternal man

I’m with you
O, you, flower of freedom

I’m with you
O, flower ….O, Mandela
Mandela
Our eternal man
Mandela
Our eternal man

I’m with you
O, you, flower of freedom
I’m with you
O, flower ….O, Mandela
Our eternal man

Poet: Pezhman Mosleh
Translator: Lida Kavoosi

I REMEMBER here by the fire,
In the flickering reds and saffrons,
They came in a ramshackle tub,
Pilgrims in tall hats,
Pilgrims of iron jaws,
Drifting by weeks on beaten seas,
And the random chapters say
They were glad and sang to God.

And so
Since the iron-jawed men sat down
And said, "Thanks, O God,"
For life and soup and a little less
Than a hobo handout to-day,
Since gray winds blew gray patterns of sleet on Plymouth Rock,
Since the iron-jawed men sang "Thanks, O God,"
You and I, O Child of the West,
Remember more than ever
November and the hunter's moon,
November and the yellow-spotted hills.

And so
In the name of the iron-jawed men
I will stand up and say yes till the finish is come and gone.
God of all broken hearts, empty hands, sleeping soldiers,
God of all star-flung beaches of night sky,
I and my love-child stand up together to-day and sing: "Thanks, O God."

My thoughts are merely a tangle of non-conformant
chemicals in an ultra-responsive setting;
echoes of scarcely delayed feelings,
millimetrically placed and ready to be felt;
remnants of cromagnon desires,
keeping me occupied, unassuming and tame,
while life rolls on silently, reflexively and impressively,
with all its humiliating nerve.

Rumination is for cows, guppies, and humans alike,
and saffrons, sapphires and the snow all reason in their own way,
no less conscious than our total unconsciousness.
Like a rock or plant, man is authoritatively ignorant of his ignorance,
and in his metaphysical realism lives and loves and dies,
without a clue that he never lived, never loved and was perpetually dead.
Thought’s true thought is to block awareness
by darkening the place where true awareness lies.

We think therefore we think:
to god (I mean exact-Nature) no other valid reason exists.
We conveniently overrate rationality
in self-serving cycles of chronic urgency and folly,
leaving us continually stuck to our cyclic fate.
Life is Nature’s grunt or roar
(whatever and the same)
all just a sound, faint or not.

We are unsubstantial and chimerical animals by excellence,
and in the circle inside the box we live in, our fancy appears really real.  
As a feeling awaits its chemical fate, in the millimetric second that lingers,
whole worlds are imagined, and our universe and all is perceived:
violence, joy, depression, hope, and unbearable pain are unleashed,
cities are wanted, planned and assembled,
while man, impeccably and in turns, plays god, king and beggar,
and true lives, true loves and true deities are born.

As man progresses (i.e. transgresses his own nature)
and as he overcomes thought, word and feeling,
he ceases to be restrictively alive: he is released, he is now free.
Thought stands alongside feeling,
without communication nor vibration,
and gradually and painfully amalgamate into a new corrosive mix,
directly eating into spirit, flesh, and understanding,
until our wholeness wholly disintegrates.  

The world as we know it folds upon itself,  layer by layer,
in an inner spectacle of perfect annihilation and renewal.
The chasm separating man from himself contracts
(eventually to nil)
and man plunges from the edge of this last plank (4).
As he falls, in mid-flight,
the ultimate metamorphosis occurs,
and an übermensch is born.

I'll always feel in my chest broken Septembers. I am languishing with the days, head first to a point of no return. I am the ghost of an abducted goddess, the one who bled all over saffrons and still holds on to her sorrows. I bid farewell to the sunglow on wildflowers. I bid farewell to daylit copper fields. I bid farewell to golden hours, as down I descend to the sweetest madness, and up it goes to consume me.

I took a step forward to taste the waters
I dive deep in my destiny only to find a never ending storm
Fury waters and rogue waves vast with despair
My thoughts and dreams written on the swell disappearing as soon as they appear

My life is dark as midnight on the waters
And lightning revealing only nightmares
Bitter are the tears falling down my cheeks
And the rain can’t wash

I am trapped in my low self esteem
Hands tied I let my weakness helplessly take me under
How do I get out?
How do I take back control?

The fiery winds I hear passing create swells of my misery
The distant sky above me roaring near my ear
A disguise to my cry for help
I wonder if there will be a moment where everything will be aligned

A moment where you float in calm waters
As the sun’s dipping below the horizon
A moment where you picture painted skies of crimsons blended with tangerines and saffrons
The crisp circle casting its colors on a quivering path across the waters
And you get the promise of new dreams after the velvety night

I am in troubled waters and I am weaken by the strong tides underneath pulling me in on a pathless deep
The enormous waves taking me under as soon as I pull my head out
When does it end?

When you uproot a poet, you ****** away her 'self'
Because her self is enjoined to the soil beneath her feet,
With tendrils she seeks sustenance from her land
And blooms into songs of love and promises to keep
When you rob a painter of her colour palette
That shone messily but beautifully of the hues,
Of saffrons and greens merging together and seeping
Into the brown of her skin- the only colour she knew,
You turn her hands into barely-there phantoms,
Unable to create a canvas of her heart's song,
Jarred by chants of 'who are you?' 'where are you from?'
'do you belong?' 'prove you belong!'
How does she prove her belonging to the cradle
That birthed her, that housed her,
Whose elements are admixed with all her blood inside
How does she profess her allegiance to that earth?
It is as if being exhorted to prove she is alive,
inhale, see!, exhale, see!, I breathe, see!
It is as if being wrenched by her limbs to gauge their depth
the pulse in my arteries, see!, these crimson rhythmic spurts, see
O my land, I bleed with abandon;
O my land, I bleed in poetry for thee.