No bleeding nightingales singing love songs
To thorny, needling roses.
No praising of prophets and their dreams.
What changes! What changes!
Raindrops calling the earth filthy,
Sons accepting prison rather than their fathers’ advice,
Women longing openly for forbidden sex,
Common people called to rise against their kings.”
Hafez is equally astonished: “How wonderful!
Poems composed for the people,
And not for patrons, conquerors or other poets
With nothing better to do with their time
Than soak their feet, sing songs and eat figs!
Everything in these new poems is touched!
Sometimes rough, yet right.
Sometimes tough, yet loving.
Times are so different.
Minds are so different.
Love is so different.
Poems are so different.
And I am becoming so different hearing them!”
“Yes, yes,” Rumi agrees, “But still …”
“But still, what?” asks Pirooz,
Watching the Mowlana’s eyes flutter until they are closed.
Rumi answers: “But still I want to hear the sound of a Nay,
Those wonderful flutes whittled from hollow marsh reeds.”
And so Pirooz obliges and changes the disc
And as the ancient woody notes echo
From the disk’s modern grooves,
Rumi sings as if to himself:
“I have had two lives but only one death!
My death was in a bed in one room in one city.
My lives spread over the world and history.”
Now the new words spilling from his wine-stained lips
Give way to old words from old poems:
‘Come to us
Bring music to us
Rise! Let us beat the drums
And have a celebration here.
I am God, let us say yes.
Our souls are in ecstasy, yes
Intoxicated, but not from wine
But by love and music.
‘My brother, you are all intellect
The rest of you is flesh and bones
The soul of this world we are—
Not just bodies, sagging and perishing,
We are not bound to earth
We are spirits
Love is our mother
We are born out of love!
Love is the most wondrous temptation
Worship love, my friend,
All else is nothing but wind
Love means farewell to reason
Today is the day of farewell
The day of farewell is today!’”
By the time Rumi finishes Hafez is already asleep.
So Pirooz pulls off the old poet’s shoes
And covers him with an afghan
And blows out the candle.
He offers Rumi his own bed and,
Taking a blanket and pillow for himself,
Curls up on the floor, at the master’s feet.
Although the floor boards are hard,
And the two poets are making the sounds of the locomotives
Not yet invented when they were mortal men,
Pirooz nevertheless sleeps soundly
As if in his boyhood home in Iran,
On a soft bed of belongingness.
10 Slam At The Sad Ghazal
Tonight Pirooz promises to take Hafez and Rumi
To Greenwich Village, to the Sad Ghazal,
To the Friday night poetry slam,
Where poets compete,
Like sumo wrestlers compete,
Until only one is left inside the holy ring.
“You have been promising to take us for weeks,” says Hafez.
“Tonight you are actually going to do it?”
“Yes,” answers Pirooz,
“Tonight I am finally brave enough to
Read my poems to strangers—
If I can make a fool of myself in front of
The Great Rumi and the Great Hafez,
Why should I fear a roomful of strangers?”
And so they go, in Hafez’s cab,
The entire time Hafez lamenting that
Mitra’s mother would not let her come along.
“‘You may not go out with him,’ she said to Mitra,
“‘Not tonight, not in a thousand years!’”
Says Pirooz: “You cannot blame a mother for not wanting
Her teenage daughter to go out with a cabbie.”
“Or with a poet!” adds Rumi.
The Sad Ghazal is as dark inside
As the November night outside,
And filled to the gills with people and
Steaming cups of espresso and cappuccino.
The three Persians zigzag across the coffee house until
They find a tiny table by the kitchen door.
Far across the room is a small stage, lighted by a single light.
There is a stool and a microphone.
To haphazard applause, a man with beady eyes and small ears
Takes the stage and welcomes everyone.
“I know this man,” Pirooz whispers to Rumi and Hafez.
“He is a professor who knows everything about poetry,
Except how to read it or write it.
Oh how dull his lectures are!
Every term he chases a dozen bright students out of liberal arts!”
The Dull Professor introduces the first poet,
A young woman with hair so wild and flying
That she looks like an uprooted onion.
She immediately begins a poem she calls
“Clock Shop Inside”:
“Tick-tock, tick-tock,
Every cell has a clock.
From head to toe bio-clocks tick-tock.
Sperm meets Ovum in the nick of time, tick-tock.
“Tick-tock, tick-tock
Gene clocks evolved even behind the knees
To tell the one with luck
The best and safest time-chunk
To sleep, to forage, to mate,
Even when to age and then click-clunk.
“From simple quartz to sizzling quarks,
From the planets to the stars,
To palpitating hearts,
Everything is a clock,
Ticking and ticking and wearing away.
Even love is a clock,
A sad clock that runs out,
A crazy clock that runs amok,
When all its hands—
The I’ll-love-you-forever hand,
The until-death-do-us-part hand—
Gets stuck, gets stuck,
Like a dead coo-coo in a rusted clock.
My clock lusts to tick and tock backwards
To find the grandfather clock of all clocks,
At the first tick of time.”
As firecracker applause fills the coffee house,
Rumi leans toward Pirooz’s ear, whispering:
“Wait until she dies and discovers that
There is no such thing as time—only the endless now.”
“Now is endless here, too,” Pirooz whispers back.
The next poet is an ebony man
With dreadlocks to the middle of his back.
He speaks in steel-drum Caribbean English,
His words as finely chopped as sugar cane.
He has entitled his poem “I Hid Inside the Smile of Mr. Death”:
“I was born wild.
I was almost tamed.
Then I rebelled.
I was exiled.
I searched for truth!
It was unreachable.
I found love.
It was unreliable.
I found beauty.
It was untouchable,
And perishable.
I was lonely.
I wrote a poem.
Except for Mr. Death.
I ran and hid inside his smile.”
The next poet is a women with bootcamp hair
And such hatred in her eyes
That Hafez slides down in his chair.
The woman growls her poem the way
German shepherds growl at happy cats.
She calls her poem “The Roles of Holes and Poles”:
“The mystery of sex,
In the supermarket of life is this:
There are more holes than poles.
Yet holes are so dear while poles are a dime a dozen.
So biology defies the theory of Supply and Demand,
Night after night.”
The audience obediently claps,
And some angry man shouts, “Right-on! Yes!”
The Dull Professor next announces that
A new poet named Pirooz has entered the slam.
So Pirooz takes his poem from his coat and shuffles to the stage,
And nervously adjusts his red beret,
As if it were the volume knob on a radio.
“The name of my poem is Fuzzy Dardedel,” he says,
“Written in honor of Lotfi Zadeh, the Iranian scientist,
Who first introduced the concept of fuzzy logic and thought.”
He clears his throat and begins:
“Strolling on a foggy night,
Talking to Zadeh, a witty scientist,
I discovered how fuzzy our minds are.
When I told him that my lover wore red silk
He asked me: ‘What shade of red?’
I said: ‘Well, it was not maroon or magenta or pink,
But a sexy red just a little lighter than the stoplight
That freezes people in their tracks.’
Zadeh insisted that I ‘Be precise!’
A little frustrated, I demanded, ‘But how?’
‘By specifying the frequency of the light,” he said.
Timidly, I asked him: ‘Even if I had the frequency for you,
Could you really visualize the exact hue?’
‘Only if I used a spectral wheel,’ he grinned, suggesting
That the next time we met I should bring a scale and tape
To measure words like heavy and short, too.
He smiled the most teasingly fuzzy smile.
“We said goodnight but a pesky question stayed with me:
How can words, paintings, music describe anything precisely?
One can visualize a dove, its meaning rather crisp and clear.
But words like love, truth, beauty, happiness, sadness, joy,
Do not project meanings well defined.
These are intoxicated words—fuzzy, fuzzy words,
Meandering human consciousness like crazy hordes,
Making communication as hazardous
As swimming along shark-infested shores.
Even in the austere world of math and logic
Incompleteness, randomness, and fuzziness are rife.
Vagueness permeates everything—even love.
“Reality is infinite and eternal,
But language is finite and temporal.
When the troubled mind complains,
Language shouts back to the mind:
‘You created me fuzzy, even inadequate,
And now you complain that I am inadequate?
You remind me of God who creates lemons
But commands them to be persimmons!’
“Even if we are fuzzy from head to toe,
We are still condemned to communicate from head to toe.
So we imprecisely, though efficiently, say what we want to say
And others imprecisely, though efficiently, understand what we say.
Thus this poem of mine is more or less fuzzy.
And more or less fuzzy is fuzzy, too.”
The applause is timid and unsure,
Until Rumi jumps up
And slaps his hands together like a maid beating dirty rugs.
Soon everyone is on their feet,
Firecracking with their feet and their hands.
Pirooz, relieved that he is finished, rushes back to the table,
And buries his face in the wide mouth of his cappuccino cup.
“That was very nice,” says Hafez, patting him on the back,
“Though I fear you too clearly made your point,
For it to be a truly great poem.”
“Nonsense!” Rumi says. “It was perfectly fuzzy!”
“Thank you, Mowlana,” Pirooz mumbles.
The next poet is old and bony and his skin
Is as translucent as the hide of a saltwater shrimp.
He screams his poem—“Birthplace/Earthplace”—so loud
And so very fast that the microphone howls in surrender:
“Born into a filthy world I picked up a big broom and
Tried to sweep the big filth away.
But as I pooshed and pooshed the broom,
I found my broom and me reflected in a mirror,
Along with the big filthy world I was trying to clean.
Hopeless, enraged, disgusted, afraid,
I threw the broom at the mirror,
Shattering the filthy world,
Shattering my filthy broom and filthy self,
Making the filthy world filthier yet.
So I went home and took a nap.”
The slam goes on, poet after poet, poem after poem,
Caffeine empowering the crowd
To cheer, to boo, to clap and stomp,
To demand more and more.
A wayward Catholic priest,
His new wife cheering him on,
Scrambles to the stage and recites the poem
He calls “Holy Material Me”:
“I am addicted to oxygen—let me breathe.
I am addicted to sex—let me touch.
I am addicted to food and wine—let me eat and sip.
I am addicted to music—let me tap my foot.
I am addicted to beauty—let me take it in.
I am addicted to life—Let me live.
My think, my feel, and my love exist because matter exists.
Praise be to the Holy Matter, creator of what exists.”
Now a Swedish woman takes the stage.
She has a string of carrots around her neck
And a huge flashlight in each hand.
As she recites her poem she
Splashes the ceiling and the walls,
And the stunned faces of the audience,
With Tinker Bell circles of dizzying light.
She calls her poem “New God of the New Eden”:
“I rush to visit the New God of the fields,
As the headlines screamingly advertise,
That His Holiness has just arrived
In the Garden of Eden recently modified,
In a biosphere surrounded by barbed-wire and false meaning.
“I find the New God standing upright,
In white robes, smirking, cross-eyed,
Dribbling copper pennies on his chin.
He is nothing but a scientist mad with greed,
Keyed to success by engineering new seeds,
Sanctified by progress to commit bio-misdeeds,
Bio-Frankensteining tomatoes and potatoes,
Bio-Frankensteining lima beans, nature, and man.
“I demand through my bullhorn: ‘Why, but why?’
“His Holiness declares: ‘Dear child,
This is the process necessary to feed
The quantity of wide open mouths
That thoughtless copulation has produced.
I create largesse for those who lack finesse,
The quantity which devours the quality.
‘“So blame me not,’
Sayeth the New God of the New Eden.
‘For I am the Father, The Sun God,
And the Holy Short-order Cook.
Take my body, eat, and copulate.’”
Hafez leans toward Pirooz and whispers:
“I often recited my poems holding a lighted candle.
I remember once …”
Hafez cannot finish his story because
He is suddenly gasping and grabbing at his heart,
Seeing on the stage a beautiful young woman,
Wearing a long dress, as white as any bride’s.
He jabs the air with his finger until he can speak:
“Mitra! That is Mitra! My Mitra!”
It is the first time Pirooz has seen her.
He sees immediately why Hafez has fallen.
“My God,” he whispers. “If this is Mitra, then who needs God!”
“Yes,” Rumi whispers back. “She is both the embodiment of love
And the body of love—in one body.”
All three watch with awe as Mitra floats to the microphone,
Folds her delicate hands in front of her young breasts,
And repeats some very old words:
“My beloved is white and ruddy,
The chiefest among ten thousand.
His head is as the most fine gold,
His locks are bushy, and black as a raven.
His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters,
Washed with milk and fitly set.
His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers,
His lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.
His mouth is most sweet, yea, he is altogether lovely.
This is my beloved and this is my friend.”
The audience is silent, stunned, perplexed,
Uncertain about what it has heard.
Who is this young woman?
And what were those words?
Those simple, sweet, bodacious words of love?
Where was the required anger?
The sour irony and self-indulgent angst?
The opaque allusions,
The translucent delusions?
The required gloom and doom?
Hafez jumps to his feet and spreads his arms,
And as Mitra walks toward him he offers a poem of his own.
Like hers, it is from the ancient Hebraic love songs,
From an old testament as new as the newest love,
From “The Song of Solomon”:
“How beautiful are thy feet with shoes,
O prince’s daughter!
The joints of thy thighs are like jewels,
The work of the hands of a cunning workman.
Thy navel is like a round goblet which wanteth not liquor.
Thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.
Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.
Thy neck is as a tower of ivory.
Thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon,
By the gate of Bathrabbim.…”
Now, as the entire audience sits frozen,
Hafez and Mitra walk slowly toward each other,
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