Leave the world to the poets

A poem by Mohammad Abdolmalekian
Translated by Maryam Ghodrati


Read the Poem in Persian 

Leave the world to the poets
 

Leave the world to poets

With no doubt

They will awake the words

And plant flowers and wheat in gardens

  

Leave the world to the poets

Desert and rain

Both will become happy

And both would blossom

From the fingertips of elementary kids

 Leave the world to the poets

With no doubt soldiers will sing lyrics and

Fall in love

And guns will put their heads on the hilts and

Won’t wake up

  Leave the world to the poets

Walls will be grounded and

Borders will fade

Trees would come to the streets

Will blossom in the bus lane

And birds will get on and

To all the citizens

Will give sunflower seeds

 

Didn’t you want this?

So why are you wasting your time?

Don’t be hesitant

And leave the world to the poets

 These wandering rhymes

If don’t come out from the chests

Will grow old and won’t become birds

And a world without birds

Is a hell that only shoots

Mahmoud Darwish
"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet."

"The Prison Cell"

It is possible for prison walls
To disappear,
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers.
“What did you do with the walls?”
“I gave them back to the rocks.”
“And what did you do with the ceiling?”
“I turned it into a saddle.”
“And your chain?”
“I turned it into a pencil.”

"All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true poet must be truthful."

Wilfred Owen

"Septimus was one of the first to volunteer.  He went to France to
save an England which consisted almost entirely of Shakespeare's
plays and Miss Isabel Pole in a green dress walking in a square...
Here he opened Shakespeare once more.  That boy's business of the
intoxication of language--Antony and Cleopatra--had shrivelled
utterly.  How Shakespeare loathed humanity--the putting on of
clothes, the getting of children, the sordidity of the mouth and
the belly!  This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden
in the beauty of words.  The secret signal which one generation
passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.
Dante the same.  Aeschylus (translated) the same.
(From Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway)