“At a time when literature and the arts, and just about everything else in Iran were dominated by men, when very few women were respected as poets, a young woman by the name of Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967) began writing and publishing poems that radiated with sensuality, pushing the boundaries of what could be uttered or put on paper by women.
Forugh Farrokhzad was a poet of great audacity and extraordinary talent. Her poetry was the poetry of protest– protest through revelation– revelation of the innermost world of women (considered taboo until then), their intimate secrets and desires, their sorrows, longings, aspirations and at times even their articulation through silence. Her expressions of physical and emotional intimacy, much lacking in Persian women’s poetry up to that point, placed her at the center of controversy, even among the intellectuals of the time. She was subjected to tabloid gossip and portrayed as a woman of loose morals. On February 14,1967 she died in a car crash. She was 32 years old”
- From Forugh Farrokhzad: The Rebel Poet of Iran
What can you say when you meet a poem of such honesty? when you taste the soaring tip of an eros whose silver spray is fragrant with the syrup of ecstasy? when the joyous chaos of loving throws up its fingers in wild abandon, running rivultes in the ceaseless expanse of language? when the spume of the last receding breath before shared dreams falls as water in the fertile bed of the soul?
What can you say to a poem that distills the very quintessence of loving, of the heart’s ceramic cup overflowing with the excess of another?
Farrokhzad’s poetry is harvest.
what a beautiful, raw poem. thank you for sharing it