Persian Poetry Quotes

Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty.

I sent my Soul through the Invisible, Some letter of that After-life to spell: And by and by my Soul return'd to me, And answer'd: 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell

You think of yourself as a citizen of the universe. You think you belong to this world of dust and matter. Out of this dust you have created a personal image, and have forgotten about the essence of your true origin

Woman is the light of God.

The Water said to the dirty one, “Come here.” The dirty one said, “I am too ashamed.” The water replied, “How will your shame be washed away without me?

A wealth you cannot imagine flows through you. Do not consider what strangers say. Be secluded in your secret heart-house, that bowl of silence.

Farsi Couplet: Mun tu shudam tu mun shudi,mun tun shudam tu jaan shudi Taakas na guyad baad azeen, mun deegaram tu deegari English Translation: I have become you, and you me, I am the body, you soul; So that no one can say hereafter, That you are someone, and me someone else.

Wake! For the Sun, who scatter'd into flight The Stars before him from the Field of Night, Drives Night along with them from Heav'n, and strikes The Sultan's Turret with a Shaft of Light

I died a lot to live a little with you

I belong to no religion. My religion is love. Every heart is my temple.

Oh, come with old Khayyàm, and leave the Wise To talk; one thing is certain, that Life flies; One thing is certain, and the Rest is Lies; The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

Love is simply creation's greatest joy.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit] 1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus – Tragedies 4. Sophocles – Tragedies 5. Herodotus – Histories 6. Euripides – Tragedies 7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings 9. Aristophanes – Comedies 10. Plato – Dialogues 11. Aristotle – Works 12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus 13. Euclid – Elements 14. Archimedes – Works 15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections 16. Cicero – Works 17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil – Works 19. Horace – Works 20. Livy – History of Rome 21. Ovid – Works 22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia 23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic 25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion 26. Ptolemy – Almagest 27. Lucian – Works 28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations 29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus – The Enneads 32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine 33. The Song of Roland 34. The Nibelungenlied 35. The Saga of Burnt Njál 36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica 37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy 38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales 39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Thomas More – Utopia 44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises 45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion 47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays 48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies 49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene 51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis 52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays 53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences 54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World 55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals 56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan 57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy 58. John Milton – Works 59. Molière – Comedies 60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises 61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light 62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics 63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education 64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies 65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics 66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology 67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe 68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal 69. William Congreve – The Way of the World 70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge 71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man 72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws 73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary 74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones 75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

With wine beside a gently flowing brook - this is the best; Withdrawn from sorrow in some quiet nook - this is the best

Farsi Couplet: Ba khak darat rau ast maara, Gar surmah bechashm dar neaayad. English Translation: The dust of your doorstep is just the right thing to apply, If Surmah (kohl powder) does not show its beauty in the eye!

walking towards freedom is impossible let your soul fly!

you’re already naked in this world in this time in this life beacause your next love your next hunger you next laughter and even your next tear may never come

آهای غمی که مثل یه بختک رو سینه‌ی من شده‌ای آوار از گلوی من دستاتو وردار

Stay away from the underground lake I implore, The Siren will see you are heard of no more.

ناصح به طعن گفت که رو ترک عشق کن محتاج جنگ نیست برادر، نمی‌کنم

صبا زان لولی شنگول سرمست چه داری اگهی؟ چونست حالش؟

Mr. Fakhri kept the shelves stocked with Persian classics and poetry and translations of literature from all over the world.

The lover I am; it befits me to burn; but what is the reason for your weeping and burning? The candle replied: ‘Oh my ill-fated lover, a honey-sweet [shirin] friend went away from me. Someone like Shirin has deserted me; there is fire on my head, as it was on Farhad’s.’ The candle continued, while a painful flood each moment gushed down on his yellow cheeks: 'Pretender, this love is not your game, as you have no patience, no strength to stand. Untouched you shrink from a single flame, whereas I stand still until I am consumed. If the fire of love has scorched your wings, look at me: it burned me from head to foot.

بگذر شبی به خلوت این همنشین درد تا شرح آن دهم که غمت با دلم چه کرد...

My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home.” - Foreword by Azar Nafisi

دلم دیوانه بودن با تو را می خواست...

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles...Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us.

You must take these poems as mirrors; for you know that the mirror has no form of itself, but rather reflects the face of anyone who looks in it. Just so a poem has no one particular meaning of itself , but presents to each reader his state of the moment and the completeness of his case

I wish I were like the fall...I wish I were like the fall I wish I were like the fall, silent, with no desires at all My wishes' leaves would one by one turn sallow-gold My eyes' sun would grow cold The heaven of my breast would fill with pain And suddenly a storm of grief would seize my heart Like rain my tears would start And stain my dress Oh...how lovely then, if I were like the fall Feral and bitter, with colours seeping into one another, so beautiful - In Love with Sadness

It is obvious to all who are wise that the foundation of speech will not be demolished by tempestuous events. (translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould)

The white butterly slowly sinks into the wine of your age.

I have heard that in the day of Hope and Fear the Merciful One will pardon the evil for the sake of the good. If you see evil in my words, do the same.

Suppose That I'm Inevitable Suppose that I'm inevitable Even the veins of my right hand Cross you from the drafts. On my smooth nails The breeze Which is not from the sky Is curving you Either the veins of my right hand Is running short On my pulse. Rolled along my fingers Vanished Not repeated forever For the second. I'm a half Since the first. The veins of my neck cross you all. If the warmth of my ten fingers Seized on your torn pieces of breath All is over With the dead-end alleys all in oblivion. (TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN INTO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI)

He begins to recite some verses. A Persian poem. I don’t stop desiring when my desire Is fulfilled, when my mouth wins The red lips of my beloved, When my soul expires in the sweetness of her breath. Arslan smiles, he has recognized the inimitable Hafez of Shiraz, which is confirmed by the last couplet: And you will always invoke the name of Hafez In the company of the sad and the brokenhearted.

[شبانه‌ی] 10 شبانه‌ی تُرک‌‌تازی و آتش شبانه‌ی دهم شبانه‌ی شهریورِ شَنگ شبانه‌ی چشم‌های تاتاری شبانه‌ی مغولیدن شمشیر شمشیر گویی شاه‌‌دختِ سمنگان انتقام می‌کشد از من انتقام می‌کشد از تن چهارنعل بر سمندِ خورندِ خوارزم و فرارود از صبحِ سمرقند و بخارا و نیشابور تا صلاتِ ظهرِ شهریور شهریورِ شَنگ شهریورِ آتش شمشیر شمشیر پیش می‌آیی با لب‌خندی بر چشم و حسرتی بر لب بازمی‌گردی به شهرهای خالی‌ات شهرهای بی‌مردمِ بی‌عشق

شبانه‌ی 10 شبانه‌ی تُرک‌‌تازی و آتش شبانه‌ی دهم شبانه‌ی شهریورِ شَنگ شبانه‌ی چشم‌های تاتاری شبانه‌ی مغولیدن شمشیر شمشیر گویی شاه‌‌دختِ سمنگان انتقام می‌کشد از من انتقام می‌کشد از تن چهارنعل بر سمندِ خورندِ خوارزم و فرارود از صبحِ سمرقند و بخارا و نیشابور تا صلاتِ ظهرِ شهریور شهریورِ شَنگ شهریورِ آتش شمشیر شمشیر پیش می‌آیی با لب‌خندی بر چشم و حسرتی بر لب بازمی‌گردی به شهرهای خالی‌ات شهرهای بی‌مردمِ بی‌عشق ‌ ‌ ‌

The roses have all gone; "Goodbye," we say, we must; And I shall leave the busy world one day; I must. My little room, my books, my love, my sips of wine, All these are dear to me, they'll pass away, they must.

Newspaper letters review the deserted cities & drowse at the windows in pale sun & the evening breeze’s rales. The train has stopped. ("Anna Karenina / October 18, 1910," Translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould )

When I was a kid, I had a passion too. It was poetry but I knew becoming a poet wouldn’t put food on the table. The fact that I couldn’t do anything about it made me miserable. It made me despise the world. It made me despise life.

I'll make my declaration: in my unsullied hands there's no lust to clench my fists or strike out I'm not going to get roaring drunk I don't think it's glorious to kill people I wasn't raised at the table of male supremacy - Birthplace

Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanic, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English and Portughese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague,his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.

Tawhid, Unity in its deepest sense, is the first principle of Religion, which impels the Sufis to claim that all, everything, is He. This is true not merely at that spiritual stage of Intuition in which the seer and Seen are said to be one, but even at the beginning of the Path. For the aspirant himself is said to be the very object of aspiration. Like a thief who mingles unseen with the crowd that pursues him, the obiect of our search is "closer to us than our jugular vein" (L, 16). As Ahmad Ghazali put it, "We drown in an endless ocean, yet our lips are parched with thirst.

Though at some point your daughter's desire may drive her, like the Tall Girl speaking beautiful words to her short, unseen lover, to read the poems of thirteenth century, ecstatic Persians out loud to the lonely walls of her bedroom in secret hopes that some lover would mistake her for God and come in through the eaves, it could be that somewhat later when the harshness of the jealous world has taken her tenderness apart, it will be her art, her poetry, her desire to be seen as someone who "sees" that will reassemble her into a real person with a grief-tempered joy in one eye and a fierce compassion in the other.

As I had studied the poetry of Rumi, Jami, Nizami, Hafiz and Amir Khusrau, with some difficulty in the original Persian, and with some ease in various English translations, I realised that Nanak had absorbed the ethos of Islamic poetical mysticism, inherited the belief in ecstasy of union of Baba Farid, Nizam-ud-Din Aulia and Kabir. Of

Tehran Cuddled In My Arms Tehran in my arms At the agony of death In my bosom Is an aged bull Which is mooing Yet tamed and dull Rubbing its figure on my hair. But tomorrow, It 'll be a dead body And the dustman will collect it I'm a refuge of this kicking bitch dog And I'll leave it to God... Rosa Jamali (TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN TO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI)

Five Poems" 1 Well now, hold on maybe I won't go to sleep at all and it'll be a beautiful white night or else I'll collapse completely from nerves and be calm as a rug or a bottle of pills or suddenly I'll be off Montauk swimming and loving it and not caring where 2 an invitation to lunch HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT? when I only have 16 cents and 2 packages of yoghurt there's a lesson in that, isn't there like in Chinese poetry when a leaf falls? hold off on the yoghurt till the very last, when everything may improve 3 at the Rond-Point they were eating an oyster, but here we were dropping by sculptures and seeing some paintings and the smasheroo-grates of Cadoret and music by Varese, too well Adolph Gottlieb I guess you are the hero of this day along with venison and Bill I'll sleep on the yoghurt and dream of the Persian Gulf 4 which I did it was wonderful to be in bed again and the knock on my door for once signified "hi there" and on the deafening walk through the ghettos where bombs have gone off lately left by subway violators I knew why I love taxis, yes subways are only fun when you're feeling sexy and who feels sexy after The Blue Angel well maybe a little bit 5 I seem to be defying fate, or am I avoiding it?

Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.

Before the advent of Islam, the Arab peoples constituted a cultural backwater. With the exception of poetry, they contributed virtually nothing to world civilization, unlike their neighbors—the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Persians. Islam changed all that. Shortly after its advent, the Arabs excelled in fields from astronomy to medicine to philosophy. The Muslim golden age stretched from Morocco to Persia and spanned many centuries. Likewise,

A few months ago I found a note tucked into a journal. I googled the quote. It was from a poem by Saadi, an Iranian poet who lived in the thirteenth century. It was from his masterpiece, 'Gulistan', or 'The Rose Garden', Wikipedia told me. Gulistan is 'poetry of ideas with mathematical concision', it said, possibly the most influential piece of Persian literature ever written. I read on and came across the the following lines: 'If one member is afflicted with pain, other members uneasy with remain. If you have no sympathy for human pain, the name of human you cannot retain.' That's the essence of The Kindness of Strangers.

Like A Hanged Pitcher Like a hanged pitcher, No drink is pouring off me It's natural to get numbed gradually. Pig-headed seashells! This boasting sky, Is an anchor which has fallen on my lap This dizzy sky! The moon's been cleared A shadow's coming after me Barefooted on my dreams You used to run! Enjoyed?! Numb! All my veins are connected to this land... Like a hanged pitcher Joyful of this sky One day a huge whale swallowed it as a whole. And it was over! The Gulf was over! You waved hands. Like a hanged pitcher, It's simple! I lost the game And gambled away... (TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN TO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI)

Eventually, the men’s talk of politics turned to poetry. The recitations could begin with a quatrain from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat: I need a jug of wine and a book of poetry, Half a loaf for a bite to eat, Then you and I, seated in a deserted spot, Will have more wealth than a Sultan’s realm. To which a voice might answer with a poem by Rumi: My arrow of love has arrived at the target I am in the house of mercy and my heart is a place of prayer. These gatherings went on for hours, with one guest after another reciting poems of the Persian masters—Rumi, Khayyam, Sa’adi, snd Hafez. That my father, the Colonel, who could make us cower with a single sidelong glance, produced the most skillful recitations both bewildered and fascinated me. His voice had a deep timbre perfectly suited to reciting verse, and the frequent cries of “Lovely!” and “Exquisite!” roused him to ever more passionate declamation. I listened from behind the window, enraptured by the music of a language that can sometimes sound like susurrations of a lover and sometimes like the reed’s plaintive song. The words hooked into me and wouldn’t let me go. Rivers, oceans, and deserts, the nightingale and the rose—the perennial symbols of Persian poetry first grew familiar to me through these late-night scenes in the garden, and even though I was still a young girl, only just a child, the verses called me away to different lands.

The flower-covered grave of the saint in the inner room could be seen dimly through the narrow doorway. In front of it was a wide vestibule where about two dozen people were seated in a circle. One of them was singing lustily some Persian verses, while others kept the time by clapping their hands; they joined in the refrain which was sung in chorus. Like rising tidal waves, the tempo of the singing was getting faster and faster, the clapping became more frantic and heads rolled from side to side, keeping time with the tempestuous melody. Eyes were closed and everyone was lost in the surging waves of emotion that seemed to flow out of the Sufistic poetry of the great Roomi. Then, to his amazement Anwar saw a man in the centre of the crowd open his eyes and stare vacantly. For a moment this man was silent, ominously silent and motionless in the midst of the emotional storm that raged around him. Then he was caught by a sudden frenzy, his whole body quivered and moved, beating time to the song which by now had reached a weird and frightening crescendo, faster and faster, louder and louder. The man's hands rose high in the air and as if clutching at an unseen rope, he raised himself and started to dance, wildly, ecstatically, tearing his clothes and pulling his hair, completely unselfconscious and unrestrained, oblivious of everything by some mysterious inner urge that demanded expression in this wild manner. And then the song died on the lips of the singer, the waves of emotion receded and in the ghostly silence that descended upon the assembly the standing figure of the man in the centre which looked inspired and hallowed a moment ago, suddenly appeared ridiculous and grotesque. For a few moments he stood as if poised for another outburst of frenzy. Then, deprived of the emotional support of the song, his knees sagged and he collapsed to the ground. For several minutes Anwar was speechless; so great had the effect of this spectacle been on him. His pulse beat faster, his mind was in a whirl and, as the song stopped, he felt a gnawing emptiness in his bowels. This then was Qawwali, the ecastatic ritual of the Persian Sufis.

A woman isn't something to be used for as long as she has flavor, then tossed aside when your taste for her is gone. There's got to be some promise, some agreement that you'll be around." Marjan's embarrassment had reached combustible levels. "Isn't Father Mahoney waiting for you?" She threw her sister an icy glance. "Don't want to be late for your lesson." Julian did not seem at all perturbed by Bahar's interrogation. In fact, he seemed to be rather enjoying it. "I couldn't agree with you more. 'The Beloved is all, the Lover just a veil.'" Bahar shook her head. "It'll take a lot more than poetry to impress. Every schoolkid knows his Rumi." "Ah, but 'whatever is in the heart will come up to the tongue.' Isn't that what the old Persians used to say?

The Angles Of The Frame 1 Many years have passed since the day, I looked into a mirror, saw a wrinkled face. I've been disclosed to the bulging sands of my bed. 2 Aeons of breath account for the many veins in my atrium. 3 The bull I breast-fed for many years And I've submerged into the frame. 4 I knew the justifications were hard, Hard as against the current of water. No news from the ambiguous points something uncommon. It can't be justified by natural rules, many years we've been tangled on it. 5 This usurped land is a part of all buried treasure islands No finger points in any direction. Lost in the dead-end alleys Tracing images without a compass. 6 Horse pounding pulse sing endlessly in my blood. My kinsmen of horses… Blood-line linked as to rays of a circle like roots of a tree growing deep on the roof. 7 You can't stop the hands of the clock. You can't come back to the broken minutes. The days have been arranged one after another. The knights have left the game one after another. 8 There was a straw mat where you fell asleep. I became numb, quite used to the stillness of the house. 9 Was something supposed to get away from the core to join us? A century has passed and we still live in this house. 10 Dimensions have shifted Not exclusive to the roof The letters approved us as the residents of the house They ran away as the convicts And we got used to the standstill. (Translated from original Persian into English by Rosa Jamali)

Beauty Void lay the world, in nothingness concealed, Without a trace of light or life revealed, Save one existence which second knew- Unknown the pleasant words of We and You. Then Beauty shone, from stranger glances free, Seen of herself, with naught beside to see, With garments pure of stain, the fairest flower Of virgin loveliness in bridal bower. No combing hand had smoothed a flowing tress, No mirror shown her eyes their loveliness No surma dust those cloudless orbs had known, To the bright rose her cheek no bulbul flown. No heightening hand had decked the rose with green, No patch or spot upon that cheek was seen. No zephyr from her brow had fliched a hair, No eye in thought had seen the splendour there. Her witching snares in solitude she laid, And love's sweet game without a partner played. But when bright Beauty reigns and knows her power She springs indignant from her curtained bower. She scorns seclusion and eludes the guard, And from the window looks if doors be barred. See how the tulip on the mountain grown Soon as the breath of genial Spring has blown, Bursts from the rock, impatient to display Her nascent beauty to the eye of day. When sudden to thy soul reflection brings The precious meaning of mysterious things, Thou canst not drive the thought from out thy brain; Speak, hear thou must, for silence is such pain. So beauty ne'er will quit the urgent claim Whose motive first from heavenly beauty came When from her blessed bower she fondly strayed, And to the world and man her charms displayed. In every mirror then her face was shown, Her praise in every place was heard and known. Touched by her light, the hearts of angels burned, And, like the circling spheres, their heads were turned, While saintly bands, whom purest at the sight of her, And those who bathe them in the ocean sky Cries out enraptured, "Laud to God on high!" Rays of her splendour lit the rose's breast And stirred the bulbul's heart with sweet unrest. From her bright glow its cheek the flambeau fired, And myriad moths around the flame expired. Her glory lent the very sun the ray Which wakes the lotus on the flood to-day. Her loveliness made Laila's face look fair To Majnún, fettered by her every hair. She opened Shírín's sugared lips, and stole From Parvíz' breast and brave Farhád's the soul. Through her his head the Moon of Canaan raised, And fond Zulaikha perished as she gazed. Yes, though she shrinks from earthly lovers' call, Eternal Beauty is the queen of all; In every curtained bower the screen she holds, About each captured heart her bonds enfolds. Through her sweet love the heart its life retains, The soul through love of her its object gains. The heart which maidens' gentle witcheries stir Is, though unconscious, fired with love of her. Refrain from idle speech; mistake no more: She brings her chains and we, her slaves, adore. Fair and approved of Love, thou still must own That gift of beauty comes from her alone. Thou art concealed: she meets all lifted eyes; Thou art the mirror which she beautifies. She is that mirror, if we closely view The truth- the treasure and the treasury too. But thou and I- our serious work is naught; We waste our days unmoved by earnest thought. Cease, or my task will never end, for her Sweet beauties lack a meet interpreter. Then let us still the slaves of love remain For without love we live in vain, in vain. Jámí, "Yúsuf and Zulaikha". trans. Ralph T. H. Griffith. Ballantyne Press 1882. London. p.19-22

Bahr sang in Arabic, Pashto, Persian, and English, but even if our brothers or the guards didn't understand the words, his voice was enough to free us all from our caged lives, even if only for a moment. Music and poetry are the soul's languages, and when Bahr sang, all the blocks quieted down so they could listen. His voice and his songs carried with me into solitary confinement, where I listened to Bahr and the sea in my head.

Divinity in Its Transcendence, the Absolute before any Self-manifestation, cannot be contemplated, for contemplation implies a subject and an object, and the Absolute is beyond all duality, all "place" and all knowing. It is the Mystery, the utterly inscrutable secret in the deepest part of Being, veiled behind all the inmost veils, yet somehow luring and teasing the lover. And the lover waits outside the door, ready to surrender his life at a sign.

I didn't trust it for a moment but I drank it anyway, the wine of my own poetry. It gave me the daring to take hold of the darkness and tear it down and cut it into little pieces.

Aristotle, means "the best purpose." In 384 BC he was born in Stagira, Greece on the Peninsula of Chalcidice in central Macedonia, located on the northern coast of the Aegean Sea. Aristotle was orphaned at a young age and moved to Athens as a teenager, where he continued his education at Plato’s Academy. After completing his education, Aristotle married Pythias, who bore him a daughter that they also named Pythias. In 343 BC, Philip II employed Aristotle to become the tutor to his son Alexander, who later became a great general. By 335 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his own school, known as the Lyceum. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died. Following her death Aristotle wrote most of his work, of which only remnants have survived. His most important treatises included Poetry, Politics, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics and the meaning of a soul. Aristotle spent his life studying and teaching almost every subject possible at the time and added a great deal, to most of them. His resulting works became the encyclopedia of Greek knowledge. Near the end of his life, Alexander and Aristotle unfortunately became enemies resulting from Alexander's relationship with the Persians. The details of Aristotle’s life are sketchy at best, and the biographies that Aristotle wrote remain speculative. Although Aristotle contributed to the knowledge of the day, historians can only totally agree on very few things.

Whilst I can think of you, and wander in your street, I don’t want paradise What houri could compare with you? Beside your street what heaven could suffice?

All of my moments are simply a commentary on the scent of your presence the shadow of your passing by and your leaving me In the desert of longing for what’s gone despised I am stranded there, in my thirst, like Hagar

and he’ll think the moon is a kinder glance for leaving, and love a past more complete than the road, and he’ll stand up draw breath, blink freed on the threshold of the short pause that is life

I said, "Bright moon, give me my heart back to me How long must I endure love's agony?" He spread a thousand hearts before my eyes And said, "Take yours, which is it? You tell me.

Those past springs that I lived through without you, What were they then but autumns, since the spring is you? My heart is empty now of everything but you So stay still where you are, be permanent and true A shooting star’s a matter of impulsive moments The star that mocks the darkness of the night is you

If, for a moment, I could see you in my dreams I’d know the sum of all this world’s delight, tonight

If my heart’s yours, why hurt it as you do? And if it’s not, why’s it so wild for you? Moment by moment make this heartache greater And drive this me from me now through and through

یک قطرهٔ آب بود و با دریا شد، یک ذرّهٔ خاک و با زمین یکتا شد، آمد شدن تو اندرین عالم چیست؟ آمد مگسی پدید و ناپیدا شد

Twain had already traveled himself to the Middle East in 1867, the experience of which he details in The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim’s Progress (1869), and from the 1870s was much captivated by a different Persian poet, cOmar Khayyam, whose Rubáiyát Twain described as “the only poem I have ever carried about with me.

I’d noticed that in Britain and America the word Persian is generally used for the ‘nice’ things: Persian carpets, Persian food and restaurants, poetry and art, that kind of thing. But when it comes to talking about politics, and say, the nuclear programme or human rights, anything that the western media considers intimidating or distasteful, then it’s ‘Iran’ and ‘Iranian’.

Ever since the universe hovered above mankind No one was needless of knowledge's secrets

The drop of rain knows who and what it is as long as it remains a drop. When it falls back into the sea, its origin, it can no longer know.

Hey you, feasting at the table on the shore,with bread on your plate, clothes on your body. Someone from the water beckons you, beating the heavy tide with his exhausted hands... --translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould

This is the difference when we hear: you hear the door closing, I hear it opening. (translated by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould)

There is no old age like anxiety,” said one of the monks I met in India. “And there is no freedom from old age like the freedom from anxiety.” In desperate love, we always invent the characters of our partners, demanding that they be what we need of them, and then feeling devastated when they refuse to perform the role we created in the first place. Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars, but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. The beauty of doing nothing is the goal of all your work, the final accomplishment for which you are most highly congratulated. The more exquisitely and delightfully you can do nothing, the higher your life’s achievement. You don’t necessarily need to be rich in order to experience this, either. I am having a relationship with this pizza, almost an affair. Without seeing Sicily one cannot get a clear idea of what Italy is. “No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws,” Plato wrote, “when its citizens…do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love.” In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real. The idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one’s humanity. You should never give yourself a chance to fall apart because, when you do, it becomes a tendency and it happens over and over again. You must practice staying strong, instead. People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that’s holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life. A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then they leave. They break your heart open so new light could get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you had to transform your life. The Zen masters always say that you cannot see your reflection in running water, only in still water. Your treasure—your perfection—is within you already. But to claim it, you must leave the busy commotion of the mind and abandon the desires of the ego and enter into the silence of the heart. Balinese families are always allowed to eat their own donations to the gods, since the offering is more metaphysical than literal. The way the Balinese see it, God takes what belongs to God—the gesture—while man takes what belongs to man—the food itself.) To meditate, only you must smile. Smile with face, smile with mind, and good energy will come to you and clean away dirty energy. Even smile in your liver. Practice tonight at hotel. Not to hurry, not to try too hard. Too serious, you make you sick. You can calling the good energy with a smile. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally “a walled garden.” The four virtues a person needs in order to be safe and happy in life: intelligence, friendship, strength and (I love this one) poetry. Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. Once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.

I have become you, and you me, I am the body, you soul; So that no one can say hereafter, That you are someone, and me someone else.

The man whom the Renaissance later presented as a monster of cruelty and perversion was a mass of contradictions. He was astute, brave, and highly impulsive – capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty, and acts of sudden kindness. He was moody and unpredictable, a bisexual who shunned close relationships, never forgave an insult, but who came to be loved for his pious foundations. The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.

I tried to cut through all our hurried centuries, lost in a forest within. Men broke by war emerged in frightful shape— more than human but also less, they were quite aware, the sovereign dead, that time is like a window opening up the sad patterns of never. As one they advanced— Lloyd George Georges Clemenceau Adolph Hitler —through history. But the past does not follow so straightforward a path said I (predictably in Italian), and, burning under their masters, they proclaimed the world a pendulum. It is possible, but this gives rise to the often-heard complaint that repetition is unavoidable. Still time issues into today, little fathers. The years, I believe, can be shaped with one’s hands. The world —its obscure moving fields, Persian tragedies, and countries in peace— I had to inform that council of the lost, remains an instrument, a valve instrument, which, when waning, is perfectly clear in the pit —and, being given to such classical concepts as freedom and necessity, laboriously continued in the traditional way— I believe I believe.

دیدبان بود تمام این سال‌ها روی برجک از مرزها محافظت می‌کرد جنگ تمام شد مدال افتخارش را زیر خاک دفن کرد و دوباره به برجک بازگشت

Sanctions levied Sanctions heavy Break my back But you will not end me Many have assailed
 Many have failed Pack after pack Blood shed but to no avail Had my share of years Had my share of tears SAVAK to crack A century of polluted atmosphere This is my land This is my clan Turn the clock back I'm as old as the history of man Gone are the golden days Gone are the golden ways Stopped in my tracks Time will lead me out of this maze Keep my people in pain Keep my people in chains Wrapped in my flag The end welcomes tyranny's campaign Levy your sanctions Heavy my reaction From The Burnt City to Ganzak I, Simurgh, will rise from the ashes History will go round History will go down Evil, domestic and foreign Will burn to the ground Time bears witness Time bears justice
Our mystic misfortune A lingering dark nimbus Rise up my wings
Rise up my kings
This majestic sovereign Will be reborn once again

The Clock Cell A Poem by Rosa Jamali Something happens to die And the sunlight which has been soaking is wet and obscure If I carry on the lines The frozen object which has been captured in your hands will drop Otherwise, the day has come to an end. Void When I get home; staring at all those cubical shapes; Standstill current of water And the sunlight which is never damp On the blank sheets of writing bursting into tears over old sheets on my bed. The elements Its essence has been painted by my blood The rain of cats and dogs on my field The moon is encompassing the land! Here with the frostbite on the iron post, I left the time on the river bank Time was a whim slipped away from my fingers The moments have been cleaned and cleared. The wall has turned blue Me and the black gown Have taken the flow of the river. It's a calf death breast-fed. What is it? Sediments on a neutral background It could be in a different colour It's been many days since I started walking on the rope The creased moon is hanging down the ceiling. Blizzard A flimsy stone The frostbite on the window glass The bridge has fallen down Silence on a metal tape Ending to a blind full stop. (TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN TO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI)

Two Black Buttons My eyes are used to the dark mood For I have sewed two black buttons into my eye SOCKETS And you are gonna touch me In this Bleak House All over the blackness... ----------------------- A POEM BY ROSA JAMALI TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN TO ENGLISH TRANSLATED BY THE AUTHOR دکمه چشم هام به نور کم عادت کرده اند به آن ها دکمه دوختم در تاریکی لمسم کن ------- شعری از رُزا جمالی از مجموعه ی این ساعت شنی که به خواب رفته است

Knotweed by Rosa Jamali I've turned to an annual plant, shielded and armed, from the genus of hollyhocks and broad leaves Whole five-thousand-year history is turning over my head It was the moment that you were buried with no shroud And I'm the weeds and icicles of this land, … Had been climbing over the flames, it was a black ladder, burning my sole feet It was the moment that I had chopped my heart, you had sucked my blood in that woundless bowl Had been growing like a wildflower, had been living for millions of years In Syriac over my body: Nail-shaped herbs had written some letters. I'm the genius of thorns with wounded heels of thousands of miles travelling in the oasis My blistered feet, weary and my parched lips Shattered by the mountain ranges I had been fighting with my claws My roots are extended with the fluent liquid in the vessels Lilacs had grown over my arms and now I've turned to the ivy as if burning in the fire I left my name on the land I stepped, … And who's this weeping human child, lamenting two thousand years in my arms? Still weeping? ! Always weeping? ! I've been raising this child for six thousand years I've grown this Persian hero to send him to the battlefield Breastfed him And he has grown out of my eyes This extreme light which has blinded me… (TRANSLATED From original Persian to English by the Poet)

The Last Street of Tehean Facing the airport, all that's now left in my grasp is a crumpled land that fits in the palm of my hand. Facing wavering sunbeams— a sun that is angry and mute. All the way from the salt sands of Dasht-e Lut, it came, the dream that forced my fingers' shift, that set my teeth on edge. A muted breeze, whirlwind spun from sand dunes all the way, even through the back alley. Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh? No longer than the palm of the hand, a short leap, exactly the length you had predicted. A huge grave in which to lay the longest night of the year to sleep. Sleep has quit our eyelids for other pastures, has dropped its anchor at the shores of garden ponds, has lost the chapped flaking of its lips, poor thing! Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh? With scissors - snip, snip - they are severing something. The alphabet shavings strewn on the ground, are they the letters that spell our family name? With every zig-zag, you cage my mother's breath, her footprints fading in the shifting sands. Are you pasting together the cut-up fragments of my face to make me laugh? No. A strange land-shape form. I will not return. I left behind a shoe, one of a pair, for you to put on and follow after me. Translated from Persian to English by Franklin Lewis

The Flintstone Block No.1: A whole nation has created the kindling Which owes you desperately But it hasn’t been specified Whether it’s the flintstone Or A firestorm? Block No.2: A piece of my happiness is in debt with the flintstone You’ve turned to the rocks But it’s for the flint stone. Block No.3: I’m in debt with the flintstone The whole world is in debt with the flintstone Block No.4: It has cast a spell For all your desires Behind the railing. Block No.5: I’m the mother of this Flintstone I’ve nourished it I’ve shed tears on it If the world is on fire I’m the one to blame. Block No.6: I’ve betrayed the heaven above God is disabled by it. Block No.7: And since then people have taken the vow of silence, … From 'Dating Noah’s Son' Rosa Jamali (TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN INTO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI)

Sanctions levied Sanctions heavy
Break my back
But you will not end me Many have assailed
Many have failed
Pack after pack
Blood shed but to no avail Had my share of years
Had my share of tears
SAVAK to crack
A century of polluted atmosphere This is my land
This is my clan
Turn the clock back
I'm as old as the history of man Gone are the golden days
Gone are the golden ways Stopped in my tracks
Time will lead me out of this maze Keep my people in pain
Keep my people in chains
Wrapped in my flag
The end welcomes tyranny's campaign Levy your sanctions
Heavy my reaction
From The Burnt City to Ganzak
I, Simurgh, will rise from the ashes History will go round History will go down
Evil, domestic and foreign Will burn to the ground Time bears witness Time bears justice
Our mystic misfortune A lingering dark nimbus Rise up my wings
Rise up my kings
This majestic sovereign Will be reborn once again

Sanctions levied Sanctions heavy Break my back But you will not end me Many have assailed
 Many have failed Pack after pack Blood shed but to no avail Had my share of years Had my share of tears SAVAK to crack A century of polluted atmosphere This is my land This is my clan Turn the clock back I'm as old as the history of man Gone are the golden days Gone are the golden ways Stopped in my tracks Time will lead me out of this maze Keep my people in pain Keep my people in chains Wrapped in my flag The end welcomes tyranny's campaign Levy your sanctions Heavy my reaction From The Burnt City to Ganzak I, Simurgh, will rise from the ashes History will go round History will go down Evil, domestic and foreign Will burn to the ground Time bears witness Time bears justice Our mystic misfortune A lingering dark nimbus Rise up my wings Rise up my kings This majestic sovereign Will be reborn once again

A book of verses, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, now that’s divine. The Rubaiyat, no longer an afterthought, I see the light!