In The Poetry

This is a poem for my grandmother, in rubaiyat stanzas as Englished by Edward Fitzgerald. My grandmother lived and died in Tehran, and here I’m thinking of her in London while driving.

Rubaiyat
for Telajune

Beyond the view of crossroads ringed with breath
her bed appears, the old-rose covers death
has smoothed and stilled; her fingers lie inert,
her nail-file [...]

This is a love poem based on a very well-loved love poem by the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmood Faiz, and I’ve taken his first line for my title.

Don’t Ask me. Love, for that First Love
after Faiz Ahmed Faiz

Don’t think I haven’t changed. Who said
absence makes the heart grow fonder?
Though I watch the sunset redden
every day, [...]

Overblown Roses

She held one up, twirling it in her hand
as if to show me how the world began
and ended in perfection. I was stunned.
How could she make a rose so woebegone,
couldn’t silk stand stiff? And how could a child,
otherwise convinced of her mother’s taste,
know what to think? It’s overblown, she smiled,
I love roses when they’re [...]

Ghazals are an old Persian form, and they’re written in self-contained couplets with a monorhyme, sometimes one- (or two- or three-) word repeated phrase, like a refrain, and the last couplet is a signature couplet, in which the writer has to refer to themselves by name, or pseudonym, or by using some kind of wordplay [...]