Thanks to Amir for the article... for Sohrab's 75th BD..
Sohrab Sepehri's 75th birthday
It was seventy five years ago on the 7th of October.
He was born in Kashan, a city by Kavir in the middle
of Iran. His parents called him Sohrab.
Where are my shoes?
Who called me - 'Sohrab!' -
with a voice as familiar
as air is to leaves?
My mother is sleeping,
Manuchehr and Parvaneh,
everyone in the city,
perhaps, is sleeping.
The May night touches each second
as easily as a fugue
and from my blanket's green border
a light breeze comes brushing my sleep.
I can smell migration approaching.
Swifts' songs feather my pillow.
He turns out to be the famous Iranian poet and
painter.
I come from Kashan. My life's not too bad.
I piece together wit and bread
with a spice of colour and metre.
My mother is finer than new leaf,
my friends than running water.
And a God lives nearby
among common gillyflowers
at the base of that tall fir.
This God swims on the mind of water,
ascends the ontogeny of plants.
After finishing high school, he leaves Kashan and
starts his college life at the University of Tehran,
School of Fine Arts.
I live where I am,
the sky is my own.
Windows, air, earth,
love, thought are mine.
What matter if
from time to time
the fungi of exile bloom?
I don't know why the good nature of horses
and the beauty of pigeons have won repute,
why no vulture is kept as a pet.
Clover yields nothing to the poppy's scarlet.
We need to rinse our eyes and view
everything in a different light.
We should cleanse our words
to be both wind and rain.
Let's close our umbrellas and stand under the rain,
shake out our memories and minds under the shower.
Let's stand together with all the people of the city,
rendezvous with friends, seek love under the rain.
Here is an opportunity to ride and to talk,
plant a lotus, play, make love with a woman,
in repeated wetting, in ever-present swimming.
We're only a step away from the water:
let's take off our clothes!
He goes on a lot of trips all over the world to
collaborate in painting exhibitions.
Removing my cotton slippers
I sat with my feet in a stream.
'How green I am today', I thought,
'how alert my body.
But what if there is some pain
lurking behind the mountains,
some threat in the trees?
But no, only a cow stands there
grazing in the parched noon.
Shadows comprehend this heat,
shadows without a fleck of light.
Children, creatures of feeling,
here is just the corner for you,
a playground airy and clean!
Perhaps after all
there are reasons for living,
love, apples, welcome poppies.
Sohrab speaks of peace ...
We shouldn't dirty this water -
it supplies a distant pigeon,
a thrush dipping its wing
by a far thicket, a pitcher
filling in a village.
We shouldn't soil it as it flows
beside the white aspen
which relieves a gaping heart.
In it a darveesh
may have dipped his poor crust.
A beautiful woman
passes by the stream:
in the water the beauty
of her face is double!
Sohrab speaks of love ...
Keep on calling me -
your voice is so good.
It is the green
growing after long
comradeship of sorrow.
In the forms of this dead-quiet era
I am even less at home
than the clarion songs of late drinkers
in the alleys they spring from.
Come: let me tell you about
my unbounded loneliness.
Nothing could ever have foreseen
this incursion of your shape.
Such is love.
His poems are so good, so delicate ...
'Where is my friend's house?'
The rider stood at the crack of dawn.
Above the sky paused for thought.
A passer-by plucked a glowing stick
from his lips and gave it to the dark sands.
Pointing to a white poplar he said:
'Before you reach that tree
you will come to an orchard aisle
greener than God's dream.
Love there is honest - feathery-blue.
Turn at the bottom of the lane
where adulthood creeps up on you,
turn to flowering loneliness.
Just two steps before that stop
where earth's fantasies mount in a spring.
A lucid fear will master you.
The air - far-reaching, candid -
will bring news of a child who rustles
in a tall fir as he reaches down
a fledgling from its shining nest.
Ask him for the way
to your friend's house.'
After fifty one years of life, he travels to England
for his blood cancer.
I must leave tonight.
Tonight I must take a suitcase big enough
to hold a shirt for this solitude.
I must go where mythical trees are seen,
where I'm summoned by the wordless zone.
'Sohrab!' - someone called me again.
Where are my shoes then?
And finally, he passed away on the 20th of April, 1980
in Tehran. He was buried the day after in his home
town, Kashan. If you travel there, you will see the
following poem on his grave.
If you're calling on me,
approach very gently
lest you crack the delicate
porcelain of my solitude.
God bless him ...