Life’s Image
By Alam Taj
1.Life
What is our life? What’s seen and what is dreamed…
mixed together
Comfort and pain, eagerness, weariness…mixed together
Pleasure, its joy, but melded with maliciousness and spite,
Gold and possessions, straining and struggle…
mixed together
Hope’s flicker of bright light, which is the lamp by which
we live---
Its lovely flame, the wind that blows it out…
mixed together
Truly, what’s possible? What’s man, who swells us with
such pride?
A tale beset with queries by the hundred… mixed together
That star of the high heavens, this rotten core that is
the earth---
Are nothing inside nothing, dreams involved with
dreams…mixed together
Our every certainty hedged round with doubts and
hesitations
Our every cause a mass of possibilities…mixed together
Are you aware what death is? It’s a lesson learned in anguish,
A silence squabbled over endlessly…mixed together
The blessings of the afterlife are dreams spun out of dreams,
Earth’s glory is the sun’s rise, and its setting…
mixed together
2.Woman
What is a woman, then? O God…! This play, plaything,
essence
With no substance, what is she? Potshards and dirt…
mixed together
Her life’s years dragging on, her mind’s new growth that
comes too late,
Seeing what’s here, longing for what might be….
mixed together
The scalding fire that is her tears, the blaze of her deceit,
Her chastity, and her immoderate lust…mixed together
An artificial face, made up of eye-shadows and rouge,
A dreadful sight, the leering of a pimp…mixed together
An evil nature that is covered over with false beauty
A weak soul hidden with a brazen lie…mixed together
3.Man
And what is man? This empty show, this nothingness,
this vegetable---
As though, to make him, heaven took dirt and sin…
mixed together
He lifts the great flag of his manly glory to the skies
But woman’s insight sees right through that flag…they’re
mixed together
What’s man but one who scrapes a nasty morsel for
himself---
His wife’s tears and her blood have made that
morsel…mixed. Together
His blazing love is soon extinguished in the sheets---
he’s present
But he’s absent; he’s kind, and then he’s angry…
mixed together
And what’s religious marriage in our irreligious age?
It’s what’s unlawful and what’s lawful now…
mixed together
It’s wedding candles that were lit with an untruthful hand
It’s wedding candies cooked with moral poison…
mixed together
Is this religious marriage, or religious fornication?
But no, I’m wrong, it’s marriage and it’s torture…
mixed together
The thing I’ve understood from my ill-omened marriage is
Companionship came with calamity…mixed together
Man is the more deceitful one, woman’s the more unfaithful,
One’s bad, the other’s worse, and both are evil…
mixed together
If one of them should turn out to be good (which happens
rarely)
That person’s filthy earth and limpid water…
mixed together
Let me sum up: if someone sees existence as it is,
This world is ugly, with a bit of beauty…mixed together.
By Alam Taj, translated by Dick Davis in Mirror of My Heart: A Thousand Years of Persian Poetry by Women (Penguin Books, 2021), reprinted by permission of Dick Davis