And feeding the pieces to crocodiles’ open jaws,
At the horizon beyond my sight.
Mullets in panic leap out of water,
Ospreys scream my fears to the chilling breeze,
And mangrove snakes stare at me,
Their tongues out tasting my anxiety.
The blue herons flap their wings, soaring away,
As if fare-welling my existence.
Oysters clinging to the mangrove roots fake death.
“I shut my eyes, let the nippy northern wind
Slap my face, to the left and to the right,
Prompting me to admit that I have always been lost,
In my questions, and stuck, too, to bothersome things,
As I am now stuck under the mangrove trees.
Calming down, my eyes still closed, I meditate
And resign myself to what may be.
Then I fall asleep into an unruffled dream.
“Suddenly I am awakened
By birds joyously celebrating another new day.
With water rising, I free my canoe and paddle on,
Finding a reincarnated sun shining brilliantly,
Welcoming the new me, and
Brimming the sanctuary with happiness.
I find my old questions and new hopes
Dancing atop the little glittering waves,
As my fears and the false answers sink into the past.”
Rumi’s cactus arms applaud without moving.
“Wonderful! Poetry has changed for the better I believe.”
“Mowlana, you are very kind,” says Pirooz.
Says Rumi: “Not so kind as to lie.”
Just then the wind picks up, gathering in a storm.
The desert convulses, slinging dust into the eyes of the new-day sky.
Pirooz covers his own eyes and hears the cabbie beep his horn.
The saguaro that is Hafez turns yellowy brown,
Crackles and shrieks, trembles and shrivels,
And then collapses like a leaky balloon.
Pirooz begins to pant and squeal, saying:
“Either I’ve angered God or bored poor Hafez to another death.
I will never write another poem again!”
Rumi laughs as he has never laughed, neither as a cactus nor a man.
“Pirooz, professor, God is not angry with you.
And, believe me, Hafez loved your poem.
But biology waits for no one it seems.
Mitra has just given birth to a fine baby boy,
And the ever-enterprising Hafez, it seems,
Has volunteered to be its eternal soul.”
Before Pirooz can grasp this most unbelievable of things,
Rumi begins to moan, to crackle and tremble,
To shrivel, shriek, and collapse,
To turn as yellowy brown as the empty cactus shell of Hafez.
“Ahhhh!” Says Pirooz, with the widest of Persian-American smiles.
“It is twins! It is twins!”
A few hours later Pirooz is in the air, heading home, heading east,
The rising sun splashing on the plane’s silver wings.
Pirooz knows where the plane is heading,
But not where he is heading,
Or where the world and all humanity are heading.
He only knows this: That the magical events he has witnessed
Are nothing, nothing, and nothing, absolutely nothing
Compared to what he has not witnessed—
The coming of being, of life, mind, and him.
And so it is, with these thoughts bubbling in his mind,
That Professor Pirooz begins the most intimate dardedel of all,
A dardedel with himself:
Now I must dardedel with me,
Wound talk and joy talk with me,
Be my own kindred spirit.
With so much hope and so much grief in me,
With so many tears to cry and laughs to laugh,
I simply don’t know what to think or feel.
I know only that I am no longer the suicidal refugee me.
I only know I am going home to live and be me.
I must become my own star
And shine with understanding as I accept me.
Will I ever know the cause of my journey,
Or the identity of the journeyer?
Will my coffin, like my mind, brim with unanswered questions,
The questions that survive in all graves
Of all the dead, in all times and all places?
Since every beginning is also an ending,
And every ending a fresh start,
Then what song are we to sing
When someone—or something—dies?
A Happy Deathday song?
A Happy Birthday song?
And is there a language we all understand for every song?
I miss Rumi! I miss Hafez!
But are they words only, or are their words only them?
How am I to know these things?
Now Pirooz borrows a pen from a student happy to lend it,
And on the back of the poem that Mitra wrote
He writes a poem of his own:
I am a Sufi atom, listen to my dardedel.
My particles sing and sama my identity.
I’m all that exists,
If God is not made of me then he is made of nothing,
And people fear, love, pay, and pray for a whole lot of nothing.
On a cosmic journey to my ultimate possibility
I unite with fellow atoms and fly to chemistry.
Then I fly higher to biology,
To life, to consciousness, and to curiosity,
To know myself, to know the rest, to know knowing.
From man, who is made of us, I get my answers.
And The Answer is not that there are no answers.
Listen, people!
I’ve learned a thing or two on my Sufi path.
Love has many hearts, truth many ears, beauty many eyes,
And the human fate is not beyond the human reach.
Unite, dream the soul’s dreams
And paint it with the colors of optimism.
Become the God of your own fate,
And be the sweetest smile of the universe,
And sama to the apex of unknown exhilarations.
Pirooz puts down the pen, yawns and falls asleep,
Missing the macaroni & cheese wheeling by on the cart.
19 American Lullaby, Persian La-la-ee
Mitra smiles at baby Rumi, and then at baby Hafez, his brother,
As they sleep in a big Persian cradle, a gift from their grandfather.
She is waiting for them to yawn and stretch awake,
To suckle the liquid love that springs white from her breasts.
Through the half-open door
She sees Pirooz and her mother holding hands.
She sees two miracles at once:
Her mother in love with a Persian again,
Pirooz in love with an American again.
She whispers to herself: “How enthralling it would be
If America could become what she claims to be,
And if Iran could become what she claims to be.
Then the two nations could find each other,
The way my mother and Pirooz have found each other.
Am I not a love child of East and West finding each other?
So why not this vasal of nations—this beautiful possibility?”
She smiles at her own thoughts,
Thinking of Pirooz’s mantra of Pseudo Impossibilities:
“Possibilities conquer impossibilities,
Possibilities conquer impossibilities.”
Nothing surprises Mitra anymore, not Pirooz and her mother,
Not the Poem of Poems just now slipping through the window,
Spreading its majestic wings over her babies
To shade them from the sunrays clamoring to ki
ss their eyes.
The poem the bird recites is a silent one,
But it awakens them nonetheless,
And they cry out for their mother’s love.
So Mitra gathers them in her arms and sings to them
The first lines of the lullaby she has written for them,
Calling it “A Lullaby for Awakening Stars”:
“Baby Hafez,
Baby Rumi,
It’s time to wake up my stars
And rest on my knee.
It’s time to suckle
My Milky Way wine,
Brewing inside me
Since the first day of time.”
As the babies find her breasts and feast,
The enchanted bird flaps from the cradle
And lands featherly on Mitra’s head.
Bending low to kiss her cheeks,
Her lips, her brows and eyes,
It tells her with a whisper:
“Life is an unfinished verse.
I, too, am an unfinished verse, the one-verse,
The unity of the universe.”
Then it flaps into the poems of all languages and all times,
And fades in the world of hidden lights.
Satiated, delicious smiles enamor the babies as
Mitra puts them in the cradle like a pair of happy dreams.
The poems of Hafez pasted on her walls,
The portrait of Hafez and her naked in the sea with seagulls,
Remind her of their glorious vasal,
Of the bittersweet temporariness in one thing and all,
In her cherry blossoming times,
In her girlish pirouetting times,
In her dream-coming-true times,
In her tragic and grieving times,
And yes, even in her imagined times.
She holds her harp close to her heart,
Wishing it were her cabby Hafez,
Wishing it were her poet Hafez.
She sings the rest of her dardedel lullaby:
“Thank you my babies
My twin parakeets,
Dazzling gifts
From my lover’s sweet seeds.
Though my lover can’t hear me,
My love is still near me,
How can I miss my Hafez
When Hafez is here with me?
Can stars long expired
Still shine in the sky?
Thanks to you little lights
I see they fly high.
So twinkle your dreams
And suckle my love,
Brought forth from the moon
By a singing white dove.
Lullaby, la-la-ee, lullaby, la-la-ee.
“But beware my darlings,
Darlings beware,
As you grow up and up
You’ll face traps everywhere.
Traps of craving and apathy,
Traps of money and lies,
Set to capture your hearts,
Set to capture your minds.
But with family and friends
Joining souls into us,
We’ll summon the sun within us
And shatter the darkness surrounding us.
We’ll tear apart all those traps,
Burning to ashes all our fears,
Nourishing our rainbows
With God’s sorry tears.
Lullaby, la-la-ee, lullaby, la-la-ee.
“Baby Hafez,
Baby Rumi,
Let me tell you a story
About your father and me.
How we played lovely games
In the glittering sea,
How we found an oyster
Who gave us a key
To free our souls
For the gift of giving,
To unlock our minds
To the essence of living.
How a man and a woman,
A husband and wife,
Can melt into one
And create new life.
Lullaby, la-la-ee, lullaby, la-la-ee.
“My sweet little souls,
You have two mothers,
One mother is my love,
The other your love for others.
So loving your Mitra
Is just the start,
Love poetry and dance,
Music and art,
Liberty and justice,
The promise of science,
The virtue of nature,
And the power of conscience.
And when you are ready
Call the Children of Time,
And pour them big helpings
Of Milky Way wine.
Lullaby, la-la-ee, lullaby, la-la-ee.
“Sleep well my twin babies
In Time’s swift cradle,
For a journey awaits you
Once you are able.
A journey on the wings
Of a singing white dove,
A flight of ascendance
To the city of Love.
Gather questions from the present,
Gather wisdom from the past,
Fill up your futures
With enough beauty to last.
Build bridges strong and patient,
One going east, one west,
And line them with lanterns
To guide us in our quest.
Lullaby, la-la-ee, lullaby, la-la-ee.
“And when you are fathers
Be mothers as well,
Choose love over hate,
Choose earth over Hell.
Dream beautiful dreams
About beautiful things,
Watch the beautiful bells
To hear their beautiful rings.
Invent a new language
Every person can speak,
A dardedel language
For the vasal we all seek.
And listen to the poets,
To their lines that are true,
And let the beauty you love
Be the beauty you do.
Lullaby, la-la-ee, lullaby, la-la-ee.
Epilogue
Ascendance: The Possibility of You and Me
There is no illuminating nova.
There is no cleansing rainstorm.
There is no music lifting the spirit.
There is no prayer seducing a miracle.
There is only the possibility of me understanding you.
There is only the possibility of you understanding me.
There is only the possibility of one soul caressing another.
There is only dardedel.
Acknowledgments
This would not be the book it is without the support of my dearest friend and colleague Rob Levandoski. He is a wonderful novelist who I must say drinks too much coffee. Time and time again Rob helped me find the right American words for my hard-to-pronounce Persian thoughts.
I am also indebted to these kindred spirits for their critical reading of my novel: Professor Jerry Clinton at Princeton University; Professor Jolita Kavaliunas at The University of Akron; and Professors Fereydoon Family and Franklin Lewis and Ms Julie Sexeny at Emory University. Professor Peter Chelkowski of New York University provided me in English the classic love story of “Layla and Majnun.” Mr. Ozzie Bastanjoo of Austin, Texas, my cousin, provided me with the books on Hafez’s poetry not available to me.
I also thank Martin and Judith Shepard at The Permanent Press for not only believing in my novel, but believing it could be even better if I worked a little harder. Since he was a freshman in college, my son, now Dr. Ruzbeh Mark Parvin, insisted I should learn how to write on a word processor. He prevailed, and for it I’m a happier, more productive writer. Thank you Ruz.
Finally, I want to thank my parents, Fatemeh Parvin and Mehdi Parvin: Thank you Mother for making me drink my fruit and vegetable juices as a boy—and continuing to remind me about it long distance. I am the feisty professor I am because of your persistent love. And thank you Baba, for never minding my inquisitiveness, for never saying no t
o my imagination, for never reprimanding me for simply being myself. I wish every boy and girl in the world could have a father like you.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2003 by Manoucher Parvin
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2479-2
The Permanent Press
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www.thepermanentpress.com
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