Ahmad Shamlou (Parts of The Hyman Abraham in Fire*, 1973)

Foto de Kenya (Lake Manyara)















The deluge of dawn,
wounded and bleeding, 
runs to hail a man, a man–
beyond the ground–
of the mundane.

What a man!
What a man!

A man who believed–
the truth of a man can only blaze–
in its fated tryst with the blades.
Such loyal to Love!

And ,the mystery of his end–
constantly streams, 
in the sorrows of Love–
and the torments of Solitude.

**&**

“And who-
was ever as dignified–
as to draw the lines of My Destiny?
Which One?”

I, I alone, screamed: No!
I, I alone, soared away–
from the Fall.

I was a voice and a face-–
amongst the collection of depictions.

But then,
I was animated in the dimensions of sense.

I was,
But then I became;
Not alike a bud thriving into a rose;
and not like roots into stems;
and not like seeds into forest;
But like a man, just a man–
surging into a martyr,
The Martyr!

(Trans.: MD, June 2010, New Brunswick)
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* 'The Hymn of Abraham in Fire' was composed by Ahmad Shamlou as an elegiac poem for the execution of one of his friends, Mehdi Rezaei, in the pre-revolution Iran.
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Por: Persian Poetry in English