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When your star is unseen in this desolate sky,
your despair itself becomes a star.
My twin, the steadfast sun, and I
both grasp its far-flung brilliance.
****
In a land where water is locked up
in the very depths of desiccated rocks,
the trees are ashamed of their wizened fruits.
The honest orchard is laid waste —
such a bloodied carpet
is spread before the future.
****
Yesterday, leaning on my cane,
I returned from the trees’ cremation.
Today, I search the ashes
for my lost, homeless phoenix.
Perhaps it was you who shadowed me,
perhaps it was only my shadow.
Even though the lucky men in my land
lack stars in the heavens, lack shadows on the earth
they welcome any stars
that grace their devastated sky.
O, my friend, my only friend,
turn your anguish into constellations!
From The Wolf, no.11, 2005/06
Literal versions by Yama Yiri. Partaw Naderi was imprisoned in the notorious Pul-e-Charki prison for three years in the 1970s shortly after he’d begun to write poetry. He is now regarded as one of the leading modernist poets in Afghanistan.
Translated by Sarah Maguire
A shotgun in her parlour, Amazon says Enter.
A barefoot wedding. She gestures like treacle,
a guttering of purple in a dugout canoe on the
dream banks of the living room carpet. A diva, she
demands more body. Her want is citrus scented.
She waits in silence, a pulsating black
widow's abdomen. A calling. When you finally
wade into the first-sex smell of nectarines, she
tells you a night-time scare story : of alien
autopsy, the power of the drum, and the psychic
potential of humankind. Designed to send your
blood into the web. "Relinquish" she mouths into
the spaces between your outstretched fingers. Give
way to the sinking vibration of a temple bell. Let
her drop you, head first into the green with
nothing more to cling to than the ozone, ivy and
spider within.
After dark I call you up,
just to hear the weather report,
that the nights are drawing in now,
and how much you paid
for your latest pair of trousers.
You’ll tell me the one about
PLUTO, the giant pipeline rolling out
under the Channel on a steel drum,
how it kept the tanks fed
for our boys on the continent,
how the ice cream hut along the bay
was really a pump in disguise,
like those Ruperts that kept the Führer
guessing. And the Kamikaze who’d blaze
unswerving to the end, the enemy
you couldn’t help but admire. And I’ll
sing you American Pie again,
like that last night in the hospital,
however many times you try to die.
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