foolishly imagines / she has the right to exist.
We can look everywhere, even if we don’t want to, and everywhere we can look there is despair.
And every where, every day, people keep going. The fight goes on. Their fight goes on. They fight on. The going gets no less tough, the terrain no less difficult. The stakes rise inexorably.
People keep going, and not because they’ve zoned out or because they’re not paying attention. People keep going because they’re tuned in, despite the overwhelming consequences.
Some folks have spent years practicing being mad about multiple things at once. Some folks have spent years honing a refusal to be chill. They keep going.
Time marches on. The struggle continues. There is no certainty of victory.
Ah! Well. Neverthless,
Attribution
Forgive her.
Sometimes she forgets
she is painfully the same
as stagnant water,
hollow ditches,
foolishly imagines
she has the right to exist.
Forgive
a photo portrait’s listless rage,
whose longing for movement
melts in her paper eyes.
Forgive
this woman whose casket is washed over
by a flowing red moon,
she whose body’s thousand-year sleep
is perturbed by the night’s stormy scent.
Forgive
this woman who’s crumbling inside,
but whose eyelids tingle still with dreams of light,
whose useless hair still quivers hopelessly,
infiltrated by love’s breath.
People of the land of plain joys,
you who have opened your windows to the rain,
forgive her,
forgive because she is bewitched,
because your lives’ fertile roots
burrow into her exiled soil and pound
with envy’s rod her naive heart,
until it swells.
— Forgive Her by Forugh Farrokhzad; translation by Sholeh Wolpé