Shataw Naseri


Sitting under the brilliant shade of an elm tree

Drinking a glass of wine out of my own tears
And drawing the sketch of your gloomy visage
Upon the canvas of the red sky
While my brush was the melancholic sweat of my soul
And the fireflies murmuring around
Your gloomy tomb and
Daffodils weeping for your fore-doomed youth
“Oh woe on me, oh misery”
Dear Darling my love!
When the angry angels came drawing
You to the plague some heaven
And I, looking on them just weeping and wailing
Oh Dear darling my love
“Oh woe on me, oh misery, oh misery.”
When I draw the sweetest primroses upon the
The doomed bed of your velvety jailed body
With mine pale brush dancing with its accursed diaphone
Coquetting for the Death to keep you there
Forever In your stony corpse
Till the last line of the eternity
“Oh, woe on me, oh misery, oh misery”

When the burning tigers of my burning ambitions

Were coming closer toward mine own being
Showing their sharp teeth and their bloody paws
surrounding me piercing into the bottom
Of mine wailing heart and breaking the trembling
Pen of my cracked strolling hands and my stumbling lines,
I saw the green leaves of the shadowy geraniums
Withering with their pale sights looking up
Toward Apollo and imploring him a ray of hope.
then I galloped toward the scary tigers embracing their bright
and burning harps begging them to garble upon my soul
and to leave the last shreds of my poor hopes
upon the coffin of mine droopy wishes
and to bury them under the perennial garment of the soil
and to let my soul play the perpetual notes of Orpheus
and seduce the Eurydice of my pale hopes to come out
of the dark world of mine dark failures.
but ay! I saw her rosy figure creeping into the cave of
mine misery leaving me behind with the burning tigers
of my burning ambitions coming closer toward me.

One night, strolling in the dark and gloomy chamber of my soul

I faced a Cimmerian shadow staring right into my eyes,
its sights glaring in the abysmal corner of my psyche
and trotting and stumbling on its unblessed rear limbs.
Evading its appalling glower, I ran into another chamber
while the dusky shadow was ever chasing me
and knocking on the heinous door of my hideous soul.
I was aghast and sensing the saturnine overflow of some
immortal flood within mine wraith.
Leaning desperately on the accursed door
and looking at some bright fire within the chimney
of my poetic lines, I swore to the soul of Byron
and Don Juan that I will never open the door to the
murky shadow of mine benighted soul.
Then I saw the Stygian shadow right in front of my sights
keeping a misty pen in his right hand commanding me
to compose the deepest cracks of my ghastly soul
in to some dusty musical lines and to sing them aloud
to the rebellious Beelzebub and all the serpentine devils
that took away the wretched souls of forlorn Faust and Manfred
to their deep, deep and darkling Hell.
I took the shadow’s trembling pen and started my holy lines as such.
"Bless be upon Manfred and Faust and the whole destitute figures
whose pious guilts will be perpetual forever in
the shadowy mind of every shadowy soul."

Shataw Naseri is an Iranian and Kurd. She was born in Sanandaj, Kurdistan in 1985 and now she is a journalist. She has M.A. in English literature from Shahid Beheshti University (the best Iranian university for English Literature) in Tehran. She loves Romantic literature especially Byron.
 
 
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