Three Poems from Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season: Selected Poems, translated by Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (Poetry ’09)

God’s Rebellion
عصيان خدا Osyān-e Khodā

If I were God one night I would order the angels
to drop the sun’s disk into the furnace of darkness
In anger, I would order the caretakers of the universe
to pick the moon’s yellow leaf from the branch of night

At midnight, behind the veils of my grand palace
the hand of my roaring rage would turn the world upside down
After thousands of years of silence my tired hands
would cast down the mountains into the open mouth of the sea

I would unchain the feet of thousands of feverish stars
I would scatter the fire’s blood in the silent veins of the forests
I would tear the veils of smoke so that in the wind’s roar
the daughter of fire may dance drunk in the depth of the forests