Ghazal

I shall idolize a Turkish woman from Shiraz,
return Samarkand and Bukhara for the sake of her birthmark … (Hafez)

For the sake of a Turkish woman from Shiraz, consumed in the deadly fumes,

I shall pull the post-modern infection out by the roots.

For the moon’s face and the shapes of gazelles and tight curls,

I shall drop Jaspers, Derrida and Deleuze, and Jung too

Ah, no need of more in the garden of frantic delights.

There, weeps Mircea Eliade, no Iliad can match his plight.

What’s so special about Jaspers—it’s the jasper

     of her cheeks, the agate of eyes,

onto the grass her variegated, argus-eyed silks cascade …

You’re no passion—you’re a splinter that cannot be pulled out by force.

Toward you the native tongue creeps through snows from our kolkhoz

to the moony fields of the East, to its minefields,

where the gentle palm of a prophet lifts up a sword with its crescent maw.

Translated by Daniel Weissbort