By Mimi Khalvati
Let them be, the battles you fought, in silence.
Bury your shame, the worst you thought, in silence.
At last my Beloved has haggled with death.
'One more day' was the pearl she bought in silence.
At night she heard the blacksmith hammering chains,
at dawn the saw, the fretwork wrought in silence.
'The only wrong I've done is to live too long,'
my Beloved's eyes tell the court in silence.
She's as young as the month of Ordibehesht,
month of my birth, spring's mid-leap caught in silence.
My Beloved, under the shade of a palm,
was the girl, the mother I sought in silence.
Loneliness is innumerate. Days slip by,
suns rise that daylight moons distort in silence.
The bell on her wrist was silent, her fingers
ice cold as the julep she brought in silence.
'Mimijune! Mimijune!' My Beloved's voice
climbs three steep notes for tears to thwart in silence.
Three syllables of equal weight, equal stress,
dropped in a well, keep falling short in silence.
--------
"I wrote this poem as an elegy for my mother who died suddenly at the age of 92," Khalvati told Poets.org. "I had been separated from her since childhood, but after the Iranian revolution my mother left Iran and settled in London, where we became very close...the suffix june/jan is commonly used as a term of endearment in Farsi, meaning dear, dearest, darling, but also life or soul."
I had a somewhat chaotic but fairly nice (and very rainy) Saturday. After the cats got us up early to be fed, we went back to sleep and slept late, then had to rush to get to College Park to pick up Adam, who was coming to our area for a couple of hours to interview a friend of my parents' for a business class. Then we took him back with the intention of dropping a few things off for Daniel, but Daniel REALLY overslept -- he was apparently up most of the night working on a class project -- and since we hadn't heard from him, we stopped in the campus bookstore.
Eventually he texted and we went over to his apartment. The good news is, he has a job offer from the company that in all likelihood would be his first choice not just because it's a great company but because he has friends already working there and living in the city. The bad news is, he broke his phone (and by the time we left the student union to drive to his place, the basketball game had just let out and traffic was completely insane from one side of campus to the other). We got everything straightened out but we were very late to get to Sharkie's!
Sharkie let us play Cards Against Humanity even though her birthday present was at home since I thought I'd have time to stop there first. I mostly had cookies for dinner, which I say with no regret. When we finally got home, we fed our neglected cats and watched The Maze Runner, which was enjoyable until we started getting an explanation for what was going on -- maybe the sequel will make more sense, but decent acting was wasted on a contrived wannabe Hunger Games. From last winter, orchids at the US Botanic Garden, including the ones in the ladies' room:
1 comment:
Thank you! I can't believe this was nearly a year ago. I am NOT ready for winter.
Post a Comment