Dreams of a Happy Ending
I throw my nightmare
into your arms
with all my shaking and sweat,
but you stick your hand
into my heart
to pluck my boobs.
I throw my fear of losing words
into a book,
but you throw your shirt
on the clouded pages
to let me know
“It is missing a button”.
You have thrown in my face every day
all the small particles of dust
on the shelves and in every corner,
more sharply than a magnifying glass,
but you ignore the sandstorms
devouring your mate.
Ah! how simply you turn
our shining marriage ring
into a stinging snake
slithering so fast towards
my so-romantic dreams
of a happy ending.
“with many thanks for Becca Menon’s help recreating this poem in English”
A song of despair
People go to the park together
People go to the cinema together
People become friends now and then
and write letters to each other
they even marry each other sometimes
and live at a home for long years
always together
but always apart
like the books in the shelves
or like the stones on the graves.
Dreams of a Happy Ending & A Song of Despair © Farideh Hassanzadeh, English translation by Becca Menon
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She is the author of Eternal Voices: Interviews with Poets East and West and The Last Night with Sylvia Plath: Essays on Poetry. In addition she has translated Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson, Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, Women Poets of the World, Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry, Selected Poems of Iaroslav Seifert, Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life, Blood of Adonis by Samuel Hazo, The Beauty of Friendship: Selected Poems by Khalil Gibran, Love Poetry of the World, Classic and Contemporary, and Selected Poems by Blaga Dimitrova. the Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Her new book is Footprints of Cats in Poetry, Stories, Paintings, Politics, Religion, Medicine, Cinema and Science. |
Farideh Hassanzadeh is an Iranian poet, translator and freelance journalist. Her first book of poetry was published when she was twenty-two. Her poems appear in the anthologies Letters to the World, Contemporary Women Poets of Iran by Faramarz Soleimani, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events, edited by Tom Lombardo, The Poetry Of Iranian Women by Sheema Kalbasi, Tonight, An Anthology of World Love Poetry by Amitabh Mitra.
Chris Murray 