ROSA JAMALI

 

ROSA JAMALI

The Clock Cell

 

Something happens to die

And the sunlight which has been soaking is wet and obscure

If I carry on the lines

The frozen object which has been captured in your hands will drop

Otherwise, the day has come to an end.

 

Void

When I get home; staring at all those cubical shapes;

Standstill current of water

And the sunlight which is never damp

On the blank sheets of writing

bursting into tears over old sheets on my bed.

 

The elements

Its essence has been painted by my blood

The rain of cats and dogs on my field

The moon is encompassing the land!

 

Here with the frostbite on the iron post,

I left the time on the river bank

Time was a whim slipped away from my fingers

The moments have been cleaned and cleared.

 

The wall has turned blue

Me and the black gown

Have taken the flow of the river.

 

It's a calf death breast-fed.

 

What is it?

Sediments on a neutral background

It could be in a different colour

It's been many days since I started walking on the rope

The creased moon is hanging down the ceiling.

 

Blizzard

A flimsy stone

The frostbite on the window glass

The bridge has fallen down

Silence on a metal tape

Ending to a blind full stop.

 

  

 

 

The Fern

 

I was a seven-story being, covered in scarce species of a plant

And it was a funeral ceremony

and I was the only single mourner

First I picked a gemstone from this very soil,

And then sealed and knocked it over my forehead

I returned and had a glance at my homeland again and I shed tears on this very soil

My father was the phoenix; My mother a restless Goddess in Shush and Ecbatana and on the tomb of Mordechai

But God was with me

My far-sighted binocular eyes are a camera in this deep darkness, a whole dark loophole!

And I'm the dumb and voiceless Myth of clashes of spoons and forks at the dinner table

Deity of The Nawab Highway, heading the cemeteries

At East End of this city... What's pouring over your head blow by blow and nonstop, incessantly?

What is this entire dirt and filth in thorns and dust?

Which is covering things in a very slow pace, gentle and soft!

What's it like? What could it be?

The fairies had nested on my dark hair,

And I had washed the fairies, drained them, brewed them like rice.

You knew the time well, the moments are lingering, it's yawning and sleepy,

That very frozen moment and then absolute silence

While with my wounded nails on the stove, I was boiling over the saucepan!

When I covered the whole scene of the Revolution Square and erupted like a volcano

Perhaps I had just kept my face pale with bleaching...

 

I am the Fern

The Orphan Land

The Stepchild

Fostered Land

Burned,

And forbidden

And infected with all kinds of diseases, fake gurus, lies and manipulations

 

What has captured your heart and attached you to this land, brother?

The country which has been completely burned, half buried and the other half contaminated with Lead,

The smokes are left...

 

The Fern I am!

The Goddess of wild growing flowers,

The Lady of thorn and thistles

Upon the sorrow of the Talisman woven into my country,

And how I dug the mountains,

What have you done then?

Only a handful of soil which has been displaced

Makes me bewitched forever

Ashes which have been sprinkled over Bozorgmehr and Yazdgerd and the Great Republic

My ashes which have been spread over the seas and over the far oceans

And I have been resided in the waters of the River Euphrates forever

The stale smell of dampness;

The spider which has nested right over my head

And you had foretold all this,

You had already seen it...

 

The Naming ritual is over.

Turn off the lights. Tomorrow is a Saturday,

Oh, I will not sigh!

Mirrors have grown over my index finger!

For I have wept the waters of seven seas in six thousand years

And I have taken refuge in the corner of a chair in fury

 

The sidewalks are deserted.

Passers-by are the perpetual dead

And this deserted Military Zone

Has no longer been residential.

 

I yielded to the winds

And packed

Giving away my body

And giving my soul to the windshields

It came to pass in a second when I became a yard bird

A captive for thousands of years

To the bitter end,

My words were ashes and carbon dioxide; coal...

The Fern is an ill-bred wild seed, off the rails that is not given a name, not called by a name

It's exactly like a lettuce leaf: not happened to be named,

But it's been peeled, sliced

Misshaped, warped and deformed

Why should it be named in the first place?

 

 

 

Visual Error

 

Right at the center of universe

They opened my tied hands

And they let me go

This is the Land you have long yearned for…

 

(A dark thick veil was drawing black circles over my eyes

In a very early second, the time was set with my watch.

My hands hadn't been shaped yet,

They were immature

My dusty clay-made face

My Profile on a sculpture was the same since the Genesis

Just thick dark circles over my eyes

And my throat was silenced, its vibrations sealed and forbidden.

 

I've been blinded and ransomed to sit there and count tambourines that we had divided yesterday and finished the other day

I have been walking on rivers, splitting the seas

Ask the chronicle for how many years I split the seas

 

A tight eye pupil has encompassed the whole world

Yet me,

In desperate need of a 7-millimeter space to write on the margins of the pool

What are you speaking about?

You've been sleeping in my arms for so many years

Worms have covered the centre of universe

And this bending round shape which lingers for ever has dispatched me

What are you speaking about?

The Fahrenheit thermometer says

My temperature has increased one degree

 

Just the time we could reach the centre of the earth

We would be a landmark for you

Right, it's the land I desired for

It's pettier than what I had imagined

Its interior shell is peeling me off

They have told the sweepers to sweep us in a way nobody could be left

It's worth more than the cost of what has blinded me

It's excavating my throat tunnels

And this labyrinthine soil

Its lime shell

It's a land from here to seven millimeters there

I couldn't have dreamt this fragmented dream

 

They had untied my ropes

And I didn't know where my journey took me to, they had abandoned me on a wasteland, they didn't want me anymore!

 

Oh, wait, sister!

Wait

I have endured all this!

 

But this wound has left a scar on my body

The one which you cannot erase it

What are you speaking about?

While they have stolen the right hand of God

I have turned to a profile stone on this famine-stricken land

I have turned round and round to reach the most mysterious spot on this circle

Here is a piece of land to dig

With a naked torso of God

In the middle of a pool full of blood

How much do you pay for this labour?

The air which tightened my neck is blowing gustily

You are chasing me like a shadow

I'm a light and lantern on your shady way

It's two at midnight

Ask the chronicles for how many thousand years I have walked on the sea

We had come to watch the eclipse

 

Right at the time we stepped on the centre of the earth

Just a shady vein from my right atrium

Like a corner ends in a dead end alley

Oh, wait sister

Wait!

 

It was unprecedented

And had disappeared from my eyesight.

 

 

 

Chesslike City, Tehran

 

You see the city in my veins fast asleep

Like the obscure web over my brain

As if destroyed the fragments of my memory.

 

In the morning things were perfect

Just a watchdog which is penetrating incessantly into the eyelids

Things for sure were perfect in the morning.

 

Signals, signals, and parasites bombarded the satellite TV!

Tehran,

Like a white sheet, stagnant on the washing hanging

Still, things are perfect,

Waves moving around me;

This wretched scorching hot sultry weather

 

I'm the only driver turning into the highways

Railings like parallel lines keeping us all together

 

Is the turning forever?

 

Lack of iron and minerals,

Mercury as fast as death is shadowing the table frame now

Temperatures just dropped!

 

Tehran is the city in my veins fast asleep!

 

Railings are putting us into sleep

The ruins of the city have been left over the frame.

 

Done with your breakfast?

Shall we exit from the right?

The prism, turning and turning into the wind

As if our torn-up parched lips and the garments in the whirlwind

 

By watching I feel pins and needles in my arms

The chessboard you made

With all its dead bodies,

Surfing over the waters and waters of the metropolis!

  

 

 

Two Black Buttons

 

My eyes are used to the dark mood

For I have sewed two black buttons into my eye SOCKETS

And you are gonna touch me

In this Bleak House

All over the blackness...

 

 

ALL POEMS HAVE BEEN TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN INTO ENGLISH BY THE AUTHOR

 

ROSA JAMALI

 

ROSA JAMALI (Born 1977) is an Iranian poet, playwright, and translator. She studied Drama & Literature at the Art University of Tehran and holds a Master's degree in English literature from TEHRAN University. She has published six collections of poetry so far. Her first book," This Dead Body is Not an Apple, It is Either a Cucumber or a Pear”, was published in 1997, and opened new landscapes and possibilities to Persian contemporary poetry. Through broken syntax and word-play, she described a surreal world in which words have lost their meanings and have become jumbled objects within contemporary everyday life. In her other collections, she adapted a kind of music from classical Persian poetry and imbued it with the natural cadences of speech, juxtaposing long and short sentences. In her recent poems, she creates some layers of intertextuality with Persian Mythology and mysticism. Since then she has created works that have always been strictly engaged with the forms and conscious of styles in poetics, digressing in between various literary styles and traditions. experiencing crystal, condensed and language-based imagery taking its inspiration from the style of visionary writings of Persian transcendentalists like Suhrawardi,... Rosa Jamali’s poetry also enjoys a rich influence of English poetry. She is also an active translator; with an anthology of Anglophone poets translated to Persian. A lecturer on Persian poetry at the British Library, US Persian Study centres and has contributed to so many poetry festivals worldwide. She is a Judge in a number of prestigious poetry Prizes inside the country and has written a number of scholarly articles on Poetry, Literary theory, and Creative writing. Selection of her essay titled "Revelations in the Wind" discusses the Poetics of Persian Poetry.