Saeid !

Saeid!
Hand me my pack of cigarette.
Streets are dark deep and narrow;
And among them all,
I look for the one least trodden,
So we, the street wanderers, could walk along.
Light your matches!
It's cold enough and our lungs beseeches smoke.
Eased are my pains as this darned smoke is taken in.
As if across the world in the miniature streets,
No end is imagined to our endless tiredness.
When our each and every ambition
We had in mind took no ground,
And the wrath of words turned them awry,
And yet the table calendar is running relentlessly,
Say the word, Saeid, say,
Who is the one we can rely on?
Where is the place we can resort?
In a time when our fathers turned
Into some memorial words,
Taking a rest amid the layers of history corpus
And house is carried nothing
But an obscure sense of archaism
Who could loosely secure our
Gloomy prematured memories.
Now, we will get revived.
Maybe then we can reach a world
Where we can rest a while,
Though, not as soul-relaxing as Cactus
Looking over a long winding road;
Nor as pleasant as the stale bread, or
The books, the books, and the books
In a room with two single beds
In opposite sides,
Where you could intoxicate in the flaccidity of the words.
Though such a spectacular moment
Will never convene again,
Yet we are sure to find somewhere, someday
That we can take a rest, have a smoke,
And even die, for a little while.

By Minoosh Malekzadeh
Translated By Esmaeil Arib 2005