Tiger
You, imprisoned by this simile!
Jump! Boy! Rip!
Bars, my dear, are verses.
They soar when you flee.
For an instant, you turn pale
and sober, in papery air.
The Crow’s Sonnet
Thank God! We got rid of the battle.
—Rumi
It is neither strange
nor fun
when they knock on the door.
You see it’s a crow that says:
Damn this forgetfulness.
Always dig and hide, always search and find one.
The worm-eaten one, shit, damn—damn this forgetfulness.
Damn this forgetfulness.
This ridiculous truth, this spiritless song
will not touch me
in any way at all.
About the translators:
Kayvan Tahmasebian (https://poets.org/poet/kayvan-tahmasebian) is a poet, translator, literary critic, and the author of Isfahan’s Mold (Sadeqia dar Bayat Esfahan, 2016). His poetry has appeared in Notre Dame Review, the Hawai’i Review, Salt Hill, and Lunch Ticket, where it was a finalist for The Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts in 2017. With Rebecca Ruth Gould, he is co-translator of High Tide of the Eyes: Poems by Bijan Elahi (The Operating System, 2019).
Rebecca Ruth Gould is the author of the poetry collection Cityscapes (Alien Buddha Press, 2019) and Writers and Rebels (Yale University Press, 2016). She translates from Persian, Russian, and Georgian, and has translated books such as After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019).
