Though Pink Floyd’s The Wall was decades away when she wrote, Iran’s pop-star poet, Forough, uses the classic symbol of the wall to take a critical look at gender roles of Iran of the 1950’s once again. From her eponymous second collection, published in 1956. For more info see my first post on Forough: https://persianissugar.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/a-persian-plath/
The Wall
In the fleeting passage of cold moments
Your wild eyes
Build a wall around me
With their silence
I flee from you on roadless roads
*
Until I see the valleys in moon’s dust
Until I wash my body in pools of light
Fill my skirt with desert hyacinths
In the colorful fog of a warm summer morning
and listen to the roosters’ calls atop the villager’s hut
*
I flee from you
To press my legs hard against the grasses
Or to drink the meadow’s cold dew
Within desert folds
*
I flee from you
To see
From craggy peaks lost in clouds of darkness
Faraway seastorms dance
On a deserted beach
*
Sun setting in the distance
I take valleys, mountains, skies
under my wing
like wild doves
I hear happy melodies of desert birds
among dried-out bushes
*
I flee from you
So I can open
Far from you
The way to the city of hopes
And within the city
Undo the heavy lock to the gold castle of dreams
*
But your eyes with their silent cries
Spin a web with those paths before me
Just as they build a wall around me
In their secret’s darkness
*
Finally one day
I flee from doubt’s deceitful gaze
I ooze out like perfume from the colorful rose of dreams
I glide on waves of night breeze tresses
Until I reach sun’s shore
A sleeping world in eternal tranquility
*
I slide softly into a bed of golden clouds
Hands of light sprinkle for the joyous sky
Designs of many intentions
*
I am merry and free there
I stare into a world
Whose paths your deceitful eyes
Spin into a web before me
I stare into a world
That your deceitful eyes
Surround with a wall
Just like the darkness of your secret
Translation by: Michelle Quay
Persian is Sugar 