If you wish
your children’s pillows
to bloom pinks,
if you wish to surround cradles
in silky dreams white as snow,
if you wish their swaddling clothes
made of rainbows and
that they might play doll with
the heart of the messiah,
if you wish
your vineyards full of fruit,
if you wish the sun to drink
from the floods of your joy,
if you wish the heavy clouds
to send messages of green to your fields
and to raise the drowsy eyelids of springs,
then liberate—
liberate
the bird that nests
on my tongue.
4.6.1972
Kurdistan
*
Before I knew you,
I was self-centered, a child.
I thought
the wide sky was a tent
set up just for me,
the Earth was an island the floods left behind
to be inhabited by no one but me.
All of a sudden your love arrived
and devastated my citadel, its walls,
altered all colors
and upended all laws.
It turned the vast world into a cage
for my solitude.
It taught me to be content
with half the pillow.
1.12.1973
Voronezh
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From Dictionary of Midnight. Used with permission of the publisher, Deep Vellum. Copyright © by Abdulla Pashew. Translation copyright © by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse.
