Ghazal Games. Roger Sedarat

me to Persepolis,

      Insisted we speak English on the way.

      A mirror used to translate a language

      (i.e., dictionary) will get broken.

      Ah, mirror! Who’s the fairest of them all,

      Since radiant Marzieh stopped singing?

      A mirror: Urdu/Persian (vice/versa);

      It figures Ghalib liked to read Hafez.

      A Mir who married an old Khavari

      Begat my great-great-grandmother Ezzat.

      A mirror to a mirror back-talks twice,

      Flips meaning upside down, then right again.

      Am I reared rude enough in the U.S.

      To violate the sacred ghazal form?

      A mirrored blue sea/sky in Genesis

      Revealed the first rhyme of dichotomies.

      A) Mirror–2 B) God–1 C) –o.

      Which of the above matches your being?

      You:I, or me:Him (the eternal split

      Of object and subject in poetry).

       The Persian Poet’s Recipe for Qormeh Sabzi

      Quick! Hide this ghazal deep in your Qur’an.

      (Terrorists don’t understand the Qur’an.)

      Would you eschew convention? Follow these

      Lines to a place where truth, at its core, can

      Enjamb ghazal couplets, proclaim an end

      To Ramadan, and dine on the Qur’an.

      Stew meat, spinach, onion, parsely, tareh,

      Fenugreek, black-eyed peas, peppercorn and . . .

      I know; I shouldn’t be making this. Not

      The food, this ghazal game of the Qur’an.

      Call me Cat in the Hat or Gorbeigh dar

      Sabzi (cat in the stew) or a whore and

      A hack, subverter of sacred causes.

      Sentenced to sentences in the Qur’an,

      I will surrender, eat the dish I’ve made,

      Recite the ghazal hid in the Qur’an.

      (I didn’t try to write it, the words came

      The way the prophet transcribed the Qur’an.)

      Pure agency, I arrive in Mecca

      Both here and there: the world is my Qur’an.

      Oh, Hallaj, your blaspheming the Qur’an

      Affirms your close reading of the Qur’an.

       Ghazal Game #3: True or False

       (Put a “T” next to all statements that are correct and an “F” next to those you consider false)

      ___ Eyes are windows. Breaking them hurts the soul.

      The blindly devout monk shuttered the soul.

      ___ On Rita Dove’s “Seven Pool Players’” graves,

      This line’s inscribed in blood: “We lurk the soul.”

      ___ Not even Wall Street bonuses before

      The crash could have remotely perked the soul.

      ___ The Trekkies’ spiritual Enterprise

      Always leads them to Captain Kirk the soul.

      ___ Robert Plant sang, “I don’t know, but I’ve been

      Told, a quart of malt liquor burps the soul.”

      ___ Even the best of masturbators fail

      In perverted attempts to jerk the soul.

      ___ Assuming an instrument could prove it,

      James Brown’s movements could out-berserk the soul.

      ___ Religion best predicts where believers,

      After they die, get to insert the soul.

      ___ Such sins as rape, murder, and suicide

      Allow the devil to usurp the soul.

      ___ Eliot’s Prufrock proclaimed, “I grow old . . .

      And my receding hairline irks the soul.”

      ___ The symbolic can’t depict the divine.

      Not even “Rumi” really words the soul.

       The Beard

       for Marlene Clark

      Now all else has failed; I’m growing my beard.

      Look for the man I was behind my beard.

      No Tehran taxis stop for the mullah,

      Drivers spitting at each passerby’s beard.

      “I can’t kiss you anymore,” said his wife.

      “It’s not really you, it’s . . . that ugly beard.”

      Excerpt from the terrorist’s instructions:

      “Use Clorox bleach to kill germs and dye beard.”

      To make the Ayatollah’s effigy,

      We toilet-papered a white two-ply beard.

      “There’s Daddy!” screamed my son, the president

      Of Iran’s beard the same length as my beard.

      The prisoner pieced together poetry

      With curlicues he plucked from his gray beard.

      After the fatwa against the poet,

      The CIA loaned him their best spy beard.

      Dear writer of new Persian poetry,

      Need an apt metonym for “man”? Try “beard.”

      “Hey, Khomeini!” my aunt Shirin exclaimed,

      Fake-cutting my facial hair. “Good-bye beard!”

      Five-letter word for overgrown shadow

      Yet to be cast upon soldier boy: _______.

      The poet, in the last line of “The Beard,”

      When asked to state his name, just writes: “I, beard.”

       The Sword

      It’s true, “The pen’s mightier than the sword.”

      But what cuts off the poet’s hand? The sword.

      Deconstructionists unscrewed handles and

      Melted metal to understand the sword.

      After the overthrow of the regime,

      Newly elected leaders banned the sword.

      Because it hurt children, as a father

      I decided to reprimand the sword.

      So hot in hell the holy warrior

      Fed on his frozen heart and fanned the sword.

      The victim’s mother stopped eating kebab.