Baba Fighani

Ghazal #59 (from Paul's manuscript version)

My heart's a flowerbed tonight
from gazing on that rosy cheek.
The lamp burns oil pressed
from my almond eyes tonight.

The Pleiades are my rue seed,
the torch of the sun my confidant.
The new moon's my watchman tonight,
and Venus pounds the drum to keep him up.

Union is mine,
but I don't have the nerve to kiss and hug.
The rose is in the bedroom,
but there's a thorn in my side tonight.

From her piercing glance,
my blood floods over my shirt:
what were once eyelashes seem
needles in my eye tonight.

See my eyes scatter roses!
In the market of joyous tears,
I have great harvest of tulips
and redbud blooms tonight.

Inflamed by the lightning of her glance,
my shattered heart isn't
a few slivers of diamond--
it's an iron mountain tonight.

I am rue seed in my own fire:
Let no evil eye look
at the half-roused fortune
I have in my grasp tonight.

Cut the story short, Fighani,
before you make things too clear.
There's a bit of moonlight dwelling
with the madman in the dustbit tonight.

---

Ghazal #54 (from Welcoming Fighani, Chapter 2, p. 94-95)

Flower on flower, your cheek
blossomed in my dewy eyes.
The rosebed of your beauty
blossomed in my pure vision.

Blood drips in the meadow
from the scar at the heart of the tulip,
as if this very moment
it blossomed from my cleft heart.

Every flower your beauty's
painter painted
blossomed on the stream bank
of my moist eyes.

This morning each tulip
that blossomed from my dust
wept blood over the days
killed by your absence.

Her face, Fighani, a fresh rose
from the garden of loveliness,
blossomed to polish
the eyes of my perception.

gul gul rukhat zi diidah-i namnaak-i man shikuft
Flower on flower, your cheek blossomed in my dewy eyes.

gulzar-i husnat az nazar-i paak-i man shikuft
The rosebed of your beauty blossomed in my pure vision.

---

Ghazal #375, from Welcoming Fighani, p. 128-129, chapter 3 (I am the Wild Tulip)

My heart's in a hundred pieces,
and I keep your picture on each one.
I have onlookers gazing at every piece
through the wound in my heart.

If heaven sows the seed of grief
again and again upon my clay,
I will appear happy to him. I too
have a heart that looks out for itself.

This was the content of the letter
that my beloved wrote in response to me:
"I have a wandered like you
perched on every stone."

The ways of dishevelment--
no one knows them better than I:
I have a heart caught in the coils
of hair around a peri's face.

Thousands of useless remedies,
and not one of my pains was eased.
Now I keep another pain
next to every cure.

His collar torn, drunk,
an idol's curls in his hand--
Such is the wine-drinking,
amorous beloved I have!

If I get just a bit of what I want
from heaven's azure wheel,
my heart splits into a hundred pieces,
a scar on every one.

I am the wild tulip
that I keep far from its springtime
alone in the shadow
of a mountain, growing on flint.

These nights I resemble
the lamp of the district watchman,
for like Fighani, I am talking
with a wandering moon.