TLE OF POEM

Another kind

 That night

As you lay down

I looked at you

And took my head in my hands.

I thought: how can you be sleeping in my room?

We had been apart twenty-one months.

A piece of moon drizzled in from the window

and I could see your body, tender as a ghazal.

Mozart, sitting a little further away on a plastic chair, played piano,

many others watched from cracks in the ceiling’s woods.

Watched you for the entire night

in all your beauty.

Morning was morning of departure.

You asked: will I come back?

I did not look at you.

“I do not know”- I said.

And sat in the taxi.

The taxi left,

I did not look back.

Our love was of another kind,

Gloomy, concealed.

• Translated from Farsi/Persian into English by Fatemeh Shams and Leonard Shwartz.