ROSA JAMALI

POEMS

Chesslike City,
Tehran
ROSA JAMALI
Translated from
original Persian into
English by the Author
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 up 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 wept.
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 somkes are left...
The Fern I am!
The Goddess of growing wild flowers,
The Lady of thorn and thistles
Upon the sorrow of the Talisman woven into my country,
And how I digged 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 Tigris
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 wind
And packed
Giving away my body
And giving my soul to the windshields
It came to pass in a second when I became a yardbird
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 peeled, Sliced
Misshaped, warped and deformed
Why should it be named in the first place?
MY ROOTS
You see how the Milky Way drove on my nerves
With my bronchus, I was plowing the vague path of Being
To the essence of cloves and to the roots of chicory
I'm sticking firmly to the River Ganges;
From my roots through the circular core of the Earth
Resting on its horizontal side, soft and light sand grows
Whose lava has turned you blind the other hour?
What you have been cooking in frozen dishes is the whole mass
of all tropical lands.
And you have been running all the way on the meridians
And this wounded volcano
Has become dormant by your wrist
And you have mended the Earth
With fingers just marinated in mint and vinegar
Oh!
The lines have been mixed and overlapped
Pity!
At that very first look
It hadn't even crossed my mind
And your voice wouldn't be heard by me
While there has been a snowfall since yesterday,
No news of the waves and the sand!
I was tiptoeing on the left side of the silk road
Stagnant lagoons and morbid lawns
Its memory has been engraving on a metal box
In which stormy stems and the railroad and these rails
Are all lumbering!

It's a complicated path though it looks simple;

Sticking to the cells which have decreased their tumor-like
growth.
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 for ever?
Lack of iron and minerals,
Mercury as fast as death is shadowing the table frame now
Temperature's 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!
Rosa Jamali (Born 1977) is an Iranian poet based in Tehran. 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.