Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi
For My Daughter
Not with the milk
coursing through my breast
but with the sap
singing in my unwritten poems
did I feed you.
Long nights,
until the glowing of dew
on every lonely leaf;
I was from head to toe
a pair of open eyes,
to cool your fever
simmering the sea of my words .
Long days,
closing the white notebook
of my desirous moments,
I followed your tottering steps
in the parks and playgrounds
to reach the unreachable dandelions.
Every morning
breaking the pure silence of sunrise,
with the noise of the juicer
I exchanged my poetic fervor
with the worrying chart of your weight and height.
The once flourishing tree of my inspiration
dried up
and the yellow leaves of my look
desperately fell on the windows of bookshops
eyeing the latest books of poetry.
Oh! daughter of my despairing desires!
Tell me
other than your blossomy smile
and innocent waterfall of your hair
flowing into the lost sea of my youth,
which poem,
will quench the thirsty desert
of my endless loneliness?
Edited by: Surya Rao
Originally published in MER 19
Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi is an Iranian poet, translator and freelance journalist. Her poems appear in the anthologies Letters to the World, Contemporary, Women Poets of Iran and Anthology of Best Women Poets. She is the author of Eternal Voices: Interviews with Poets East and West, and The Last Night with Sylvia Plath: Essays on Poetry. In addition, she has translated several books, including Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life by Ian Gibson, Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry; Selected Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva; Women Poets of the World; Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry and others.