Oil Ailment - Rira Abbasi

And now I know what ails the world: Power
Humility dies on its very own emaciated neck
Even cockroaches rise
Against the sanctity of your body
The world is sated with virus.
Cover my body,
O earthly globe of bread!
When spiders became monkeys
They uprooted my eyes
And I, a woman,
I am a toothless tortoise of leather.

O you refiners of humankind!
I did not get permission to sing hospital songs
For your moonstruck eyes.
Yet, sing I will!
I have been slaughtered in the kosher custom,
Preserved in the giant freezers of Power.
In the giant freezers of Power
I am cut from Adam to the last messenger.
My intestines have the clench of your multiple claws.

Oh homeless homeland!
The roads twist in the misery of pain.
Who is he, the one who tolls the bell of all viruses?
Who is the one who puts a date on our homework
And appoints incidents?
They are reversed,
Yes, reversed.
My girls
Are reversed tortoises
And my men
Have succeeded only in taking their sister’s hand by the teeth.

O equator belt of human loneliness!
Humour with the blood of a thousand corpses?
No!
I am cut down; I have been cut from it all.
Perhaps my mother’s masterpiece was this blossomed breast of mine
In the mouth of an open mirror.
Oh what a masterpiece
And what a taste,
That cockroaches do,
I wouldn’t know, or don’t become
Eternal on a young mirror?
How fearful it is
To compose a poem in delirium
While random viruses of Power
Set fire to your today and tomorrow
In front of your very eyes!

Hello hospitalised Spring!
Your moonward eyes awaited me.
The answer to your question wanders among the morgues.
I am never scared!     Never!
I splash a succulent sneeze on your thousand year old sanctity.
My Power is viral,
One that poxes the faces of world Talibans.
Why do they not fear the flow of all waters?
The flow of all voices?
With a few issued statements,
Just a few statements, you can no longer, no longer…

Neighbour means mutual pain
And I stand naked between water and earth
Come, set me on fire or as your female slaves
Iron blaze my lips
No, you have come a lot             A lot and in numbers

Hello.
Hello hospitalised Spring!
Stained dark curtains, stained
On oil
And our mutual neighbour has been robbed from her cushion.
I lie on the oil without a cushion
And the odour of the oil makes me nauseous
Ah, if there were no oil and wine
With what madness, what ardour, could I compose a poem?

I have drawn a curtain between the five beds of the world.
Ailed neighbours and Taliban women sit around me.
They no longer mourn any death.
Perhaps a thousand Afghan mothers
Have set out to scream this smother
As I become a river, a river I say
And flow between the five drowsy beds

O nurse! Keep the lights on
This river has a mission
A mission for all words
A mission with the emaciated neck of this humble one.
Call my nurse,
And take me,
Take me
Take me away from my Muslim neighbours
My dread is no longer blood clotted
My dread is no longer death
But the return of Spring to Autumn.
I burn from fever
And the month of May laughs
I wish there were no teachers in the charter of existence
And my heads and tails thwarted poem
Was just a red flower on those five drowsy beds

O masterwork of Nature!
You made the roof and I made the walls.

I draw the curtain between hatred.
Between hatred,
When trousers robbed mothers
Shriek out sleep,
A sleep with no cushion.

Ah…
They no longer weep
No longer laugh
They sobbingly laugh out the oil
The stolen trousers, they laugh them out with a sob.

We, ill and defeated
And the general surgeon narrows his eyes
As though there has never been a flag on any patient’s desk.

Tonight, I shall take a mirror
To the mothers of robbed trousers.

How broken is this sun, how broken!
I fall, fall apart from its fall.
O human misery,
When, just when would you let go of the mirror?

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Rira Abbasi (born 1962) Iran
Translated by Maryam Ala Amjadi
Source: UniVerse