I couldn't wait to respond to Feathered Thing's call for our favorite poems.  This is better than chocolate or enchiladas or cheesecake...well maybe not cheesecake, Freaky...

First up is Wallace Stevens.  Can you believe that this guy sold insurance for a living?!  How about that?  I heard this on PBS in 1989, read by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who said it was HER favorite.  That's high praise.  I adore it.  When I heard her soothing voice say these words, I was nursing a heinous headace, lying on the couch....and I had to sit up and gaze at her while listening...she made me cry...but it was better than Tylenol!

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening
In which we rest, and for small reason, think
the world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. 
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves
out of all the indifferences, into one thing

Within a single thing, a single shawl
wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
a light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here now we forget each other and ourselves.
we feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
a knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind
we say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
we make a dwelling in the evening air,
in which being there together is enough.

Sure isn't that pure "gargeous" as my Irish father-in-law would say!

Ah, but there is another siren that calls to me...and she is my true heart's friend.  Her name is Forugh Farrokzhad and her short life ended in 1967, in an automobile accident.  She hails from the land of Rumi and Sa'adi, Hafez, and Omar Khayyam.  She was, I believe, the greatest Persian poet of the 20th century, and I adore her work. 

She married young--an arranged marriage to a much older man.  She felt stifled, wrote poetry, was published, and was forced by "familial constraint" to cease writing.  Instead, she left her marriage, and sadly, her 7 year old boy, who was, by Iranian law of the time, taken into the sole custody of her husband.  She never saw him again.  She fell in love with a great Iranian film maker, Ebrahim Golestan, and wrote many sensual poems of the affair, shocking coming from a woman and at that time unusual in Iran coming from anyone.  Her female voice cries out for justice, for passion, for empathy and understanding.  

Though the Islamic regime has tried to ban her work from time to time, she remains wildly popular.  I am grateful to read her words:

I Feel Sorry for the Garden

No one is thinking about the flowers
No one is thinking about the fish
No one wants to believe that the garden is dying,
that the heart of the garden has swollen
under the sun,
that the mind of the garden is slowly, slowly
draining of green memories.
That the garden's senses are a separate thing
rotting, huddled in a corner.

Our old courtyard is lonely
our garden yawns in anticipation
of an unknown rain.

Callow, little stars fall to earth
from treetop heights
and from the pale windows of the fishes abode,
the sound of coughing comes at night.
Our courtyard garden is alone.

Father says: It's too late for me.
It's over for me.  I shouldered my burden.

and did my share--and in this room, from dawn to dusk, he reads from either the Book of Kings, or the History of Histories

Father says to Mother:  To hell with the birds and the fish!
When I die what difference if there is a garden, or there isn't
a garden.  My pension is enough for me.

Mother's whole life is a prayer rug,
spread at the threshold of fears of hell.
at the bottom of everything,  Mother always searches for
traces of sin, and she thinks that the apostasy of a plant
has condemned the garden.
Mother prays all day long.
Mother is a natural sinner, and she breathes her prayers
on all the flowers and on all the fish,
and she exorcises herself. 
Mother is waiting for a coming and a forgiveness to descend
upon the earth.

My brother calls the garden a graveyard
He laughs at the profusion of weeds, and keeps a count
of the corpses of fish that decompose beneath
the water's sick skin.
My brother is addicted to philosophy and he thinks
the cure for the garden, lies in its destruction.
He gets drunk, and bangs on doors and walls
and gives voice to his pain and despair.
A despair he carries it along with his
identity card, pocket calendar, ballpoint and lighter
to the street and the bazaar, and his despair is so small
that every night it gets lost in the crowd at the bar.

And my sister who was a friend to the flowers
and took her heart's simple words to their kind and silent company
when Mother spanked her
and occasionally offered cake and cookies
to the family of fish
Her home is on the other side of the city
in her artificial house
with her artificial goldfish
secure in the artificial love of her husband
and under the branches of her artificial apple tree
she sings artificial songs
and produces very real babies
Whenever she comes to visit us and the hem of her skirt
gets spoiled by the garden's poverty
she bathes in perfume
Everytime she visits us, she's pregnant.

Our garden is lonely
All day long, from behind the gate
comes the sound of shattering and explosions
All our neighbors plant bombs and machine guns
in their gardens instead of flowers.
All our neighbors cover their tiled ponds,
which become unwitting storehouses for gunpowder.
And the children along our street have filled their schoolbags
with small explosives.
Our garden is confused.

I fear an age that has lost its heart.
I am scared of the idea of so many useless hands
and of picturing so many estranged faces.
Like a school child madly in love with geometry lessons,
I am alone.
And I think that the garden can be taken to a hospital
I think...
I think...
I think...
And the heart of the garden is swollen under the sun.
And the mind of the garden is slowly, slowly
draining of green memories.

If some of the references are obscure, I'll explain.  The garden, of course, is Iran.  What do you think?  Google her.  She deserves more recognition, and her voice deserves to be heard if one wants to understand Iran.  There is also a new translation of her work in English available.  By Sholeh Wolpe, it is entitled, Sin:Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad.  If you like poetry, give her a read!