Leila Farjami
“Ghost”
&
“This Orchid”
eulogy for Father
Out the window,
April waves its orange blossoms
like luminescent stars.
Above our heads,
silver planetoids spin in your room;
soft pillows of myth,
only
I can see them.
You are buoyed by light;
your body lies cold, fading.
A glowing spirit
walks past your feet,
relieved of sundown and weighted sorrows.
Is it yours?
You occupy what has been left of
your hoarded space,
your skin is opaqued,
creased shroud.
You fought
in someone else’s war,
died
in your own.
You always dreamt
of becoming a general.
Two months before
your military promotion,
the new regime won.
Had you not fled to the US
to escape persecution,
you would’ve been hanged.
Your shirts hang in the closet
like defeated soldiers
returning from burned battlefields.
Your old army suit
a ghost.
A transcendent match has been lit,
the night lamp starts burning—
its light travels
to the other world.
An unknown thing
glints and shuffles
through the dusty dim,
ascends toward the ceiling,
free as a child’s breath,
a found spark.
Ghost
This Orchid
is white and five-petaled sunlight
basking in its own beaming bliss,
virgin-bodied, crimson-hearted,
and unspoiled
as a newborn’s first breath,
drenched in life’s
eternal gray.
Clouds carrying
yesterday’s ghosts
hover above our heads.
It is their way of resurrecting
what we have forgotten.
See this foggy gorge,
the mountain’s holiness
clad in white;
a lithe tiger prowls
on the road’s edge,
stretches and stares
into the world beyond,
fancies his next prey,
blood-riddled,
lifeless.
No need for
the orchid to know all this,
or how the world will, at last,
fall apart,
temporary
as she is.
Leila Farjami is a poet, literary translator, and psychotherapist. In addition to publishing seven poetry books in Persian, her work has appeared in Cathexis Northwest Press, Hey, I’m Alive, Midwest Quarterly, Nonconformist Magazine, Nimrod Journal, and others; was published by Tupelo Press for their 30/30 Project; and has been translated into Swedish, Arabic, Turkish, and French. Leila has appeared in poetry readings and on Persian TV and radio interviews about her poetry. She studies poetry with Rachel Kann, enjoys translating sacred poetry by Rumi into English, and has translated a comprehensive volume of Sylvia Plath’s poetry into Persian.