The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles

Someone like No One

147 Someone like No One Forugh Farrokhzad I dreamed someone’s coming. I dreamed of a red star. My eyelids keep jumping and my shoes keep pairing. Blind me if I lie. I dreamed of that red star when I was awake. I saw someone’s coming. Someone’s coming. Someone different. Someone better. Someone like no one. Not like father, not like Ensi, not like any man, not like Yahya, not like mother. Someone like one should be, taller than the trees by the architect’s home, and his face even brighter than Imam Mehdi’s. He’s not afraid of Siyyid Javad’s brother —who’s gone and put on a police uniform— not even afraid of Siyyid Javid himself who owns every room of our house. And his name, as mother says in the beginning and the end of her prayers, is either Judge of Judges or Granter of Wishes. And he can recite, 148 with eyes closed, all the hard words in the third-grade book; he can even subtract a thousand from twenty million and not come up short. He can buy everything he needs from Siyyid Javad’s shop on credit; and can make the Allah lamp that used to shine green like dawn; light up again in Moftahian mosque’s sky. Oooh . . . How nice light is. How nice light is. And how I wish Yahya had a cart and a kerosene lamp so I could sit on his cart among the watermelons and cantaloupes and ride around the Mohmadieh square. Oooh . . . What fun riding around the square. What fun sleeping on the roof. What fun going to the City Park. How great the taste of Pepsi. How nice is Fardin Cinema. How I love all good things, and how I’m dying to yank Siyyid Javad’s daughter’s braids. Why am I so small 149 that I get lost in the streets? Why doesn’t father— who isn’t small and doesn’t get lost in the streets— do something to hurry the arrival of the one I’ve dreamed of? Or the folks who live in the slaughterhouse district, whose garden soil is blood soaked, whose pond water is blood streaked, and whose shoes trace blood . . . Why don’t they do something? Why don’t they do something? How lazy is the winter sun. I swept the stairs to the roof, washed the window panes too. Why does father dream only when he sleeps? I swept the stairs to the roof, washed the window panes too. Someone’s coming. Someone’s coming. Someone whose heart is with us, whose breath is with us, whose voice is with us. Someonewhosecomingcan’tbestopped,handcuffed,andthrowninjail. Someone who’s had babies under Yahya’s old trees and is getting bigger and bigger day by day. Someone’s coming from the rain, from the sound of pouring rain, 150 from among the whispering petunias. Someone’scomingfromtheskyovertheartilleryfield,onfireworks’night. And he’ll spread the tablecloth, and divide the bread, and divide the Pepsi, and divide the City Park, and divide the whooping-cough syrup, and divide the school registration day, and divide the hospital numbers, and divide the rubber boots, and divide Fardin Cinema, and divide Siyyid Javad’s daughter’s clothes, and everything else that’s left, and give us our share too. I dreamed . . . Translated by Sholeh Wolpé ...