The Love Poems of Ahmad Shamlu

From Roxana, p.91, (translated by Firoozeh Papan-Matin)

Yet the night was in turmoil,
the sea was battering.
Fierce ecstasy, never to be fulfilled, howled through this cold clutter of maddened waves in search of an escaped pleasure ...
And I realized that I had found peace,
amid the ups and downs of the sea's hasty traffickers,
like a houseless snail finding a shell.
I knew that if I threw the lantern into the sea and interpreted the darkness
of the night as no more than my closed eyes—then would I be like the
liberated Buddha who passes through pain with an unruffled heart because
he recognizes it as the leading warrior of Nirvana.

This excellent book The Love Poems of Shamlu has a supportive essay by Papan-Matin, who is a professor in Seattle at the University of Washington.

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