Forgive her.
Sometimes she forgets
she is painfully the same
as stagnant water,
hollow ditches,
foolishly imagines
she has the right to exist.
Forgive
a portrait’s listless rage,
whose longing for movement
melts in her paper eyes.
Forgive
this woman whose casket is washed over
by a flowing red moon,
her body’s thousand-year sleep
perturbed by night’s stormy scent.
Forgive
this woman who’s crumbling inside,
but whose eyelids tingle still with dreams of light,
her useless hair quivering hopelessly,
infiltrated by love’s breath.
People of the land of plain joys,
you who have opened your windows to the rain,
forgive her,
forgive because your lives’ fertile roots
burrow into her exiled soil and pound
with envy’s rod her naive heart,
until it swells.
Source: Farrokhzad, Forugh, Sholeh Wolpé, and Alicia Ostriker. Sin: Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad. , 2007, pp. 39-40. Print.*
*With minor edits by me, with insincere apologies to the imagined reader.