Where are my shoes?
Who was it who called Sohrab?
It was a familiar voice
like the touch of the wind on the leave.
My mother is asleep
so are Manouchehr and Parvaneh*
and perhaps all the townsfolk.
The June night passes gently over seconds like an elegy,
And a cool breeze from the corner of the blanket sweeps my sleep.
It smells of separation:
My pillow is full of the song of the swallow plumes.
Morning shall break,
The sky will migrate
Into this cup of water.
I must go tonight!
I who spoke to the folk in this region through the widest window,
Never heard a word that matched time;
No loving eye stared at the ground;
Nobody was enchanted by looking at the garden,
Nobody took a magpie seriously at a farm.
I am dejected like a cloud.
When I behold Houri -
the neighbor's full grown lass -
Studying theology
At the foot of the rarest elm tree on earth.
There are other things also -
moments of exaltation
(For example I saw a poetess
So absorbed watching the horizon
That the sky laid eggs in her eyes;
And one night out of other nights,
A man questioned me:
"How long does it take to the rising of grapes?)
Tonight I must go!
I must take a suitcase
Big enough to contain my shirt of loneliness
And walk in a direction
Where epic-singing trees can be seen;
Towards the vast wordless expanse
which keeps calling me.
Someone called me again: Sohrab!,
Where are my shoes?
Taken from
