Abolghasem Esmailpour: Each Grain of Sand

I sit beside the window

shroud pieces tossing in the wind

the one in grave clothes absent

perhaps banished to the Last Supper

under judgment for those lawless moments.

Where is the desiccated finger

that points to Paradise?

                     *

Sleeping in water

the woman was weeping

pressing on her breasts

the tender images of memory.

Cold

raining pearls

on the tenderness of marble

not remembering anything from the past

only warmed by

the songs of crickets

not wishing to know

who she was and where

she was setting out to lose herself.

The yellow fog clamoring

the woman waking up

at the dawn of an accident

behind the silent elm trees

falling in love with

the warm music of dawn

but her fingers not releasing

the tip of memory.

                    *

He came to the gate

The Kingdom following him

in order to find the wings of white doves

killing death in the eyes of the living

to retrieve roses

from sun-burnt eye-sockets

and kiss the helmsman’s forehead.

The ship stranded or emerged

from the impatient ocean

a typhoon on the way.

Where are we going?

The pearls melted, gone underground

I wish it were found at the pit

and my glance not dotted on

the whiteness of porcelain glass.

The dot became an eye, red at the end of the sky

or was it thrown into the ocean’s depths

eaten by the eye of a fish

at the coral island.

                   *

What did you see in your dreams

when sleeping

or being awake?

A bird fluttering

a stone in its silence

sheep drowning

in their petrifying dreams.

O stony bird!

what did you see in your dreams

when sleeping

or being awake?

Translated from the Persian by the author

Poet—mythologist—soothsayer—Abolghasem Esmailpour was born in 1954 in Babol, Iran, near the shores of the Caspian Sea.

A brilliant scholar—Abolghasem Esmailpour resides as Professor of Ancient Culture and Languages at Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran, pursuing the myths running through Mesopotamia, Babylonia, Assyria, and Persia. 

“Death smells us—we smell it too. Death is a seed we sow on the earth.

It is the seed of evil—seed of dream. Dream is the sister of life.”

His works include: Manichaean Gnosis and Creation Myth; The Hymns of Light; Symbolic Expression: A Handbook of Persian Literature; and the poetry collections: Stony Haikus; Each Grain of Sand; Up to the Cherry-Tree; and Beyond the River of the Day.

“Who called me? A bird—or a pebble? A song—or the beat of death? The star’s wing—or the the moon’s chain? Ah, the petrified angel—!”

Abolghasem Esmailpour lives in Tehran.