Thirty Birds

This starts with the intro I wrote in Enneatude group for the poem and the poem below needs spacing corrected; it wasn't even showing the stanzas and I have to go back to the original and check them.

The poem was written when I was blown away by and immersed in Persian language, history and culture. The title "Thirty Birds" references the Simorgh, mythical bird in the medieval Sufi poem Conference of the Birds, by Rumi's teacher, Attar. All the birds of the world fly to find their king, the Simorgh. Only the 30 hardiest survive the journey, where they look into a mirror and see themselves as one. They are their own king. They flew over the Seven Vales--or seven stages of Sufi initiation--to get there. Other references in the poem are to "angriman" which is me combining the ancestral Zoroastrian (Ahriman or Angra Mayu--the god of evil locked in struggle with Ahura Mazda. This is foundational to Christianity and was brought to Europe by the Roman army as Mithraism. In the poem there is a resonance of Khomeini, and also the "song girl" was the Imodern ranian poetess Forough Farrokhzad, who died in a car crash at 32. Everything else is pretty straightforward to a non-Persian versed reader.



THIRTY BIRDS

for j.

You said at the end I would find myself
That every journey is about ourselves
I trusted your hand and in silence

I went.

We walked across valleys filled with birds
and the seventh one was the valley of death
In Death Valley you rested your head on my breasts
as the clouds caress the mountains with erosion.
And then I saw you recede in the distance
and then I saw nothing but Death

I slept.

I never intended to wake
but I woke
and somehow I was on top of the mountain
something had pulled me up
and I looked

and I saw steeples
and I heard

birds birds hundreds of birds
flapping their wings
bathed in light
I heard everything
the screams of delight
the pain of the dying
the crystalline beauty of the bells

you

and angriman was there
angriman too
and his jackdaws
and the songgirl he hurled
into the wall

and the crashing of the glass
and the wretched earth
and the poor ye shall have with you always
but why?

and then there were only thirty birds
the mountain the mind and memory and erosion.

I saw a young child alone by a road
I remembered her name.
She had once been me.

I felt her recoil from a slap on the face.
I knew who she was.
I understood.

We have all been abandoned
we have all been slapped
the mountain on which I stood

had been struck

the birds too
had all been struck

every flapping
every
flutter every
leprous feather

struck

and
my father
struck

by the love he could not give
and my mother by the love
she gave too much

and terror and
feathers
and
fear of the road

and the idiot angriman
foaming invectives

and you who had left me
you too
struck

and then
everything was

me

and
you and
thirty birds

and my father
and my mother and

one bird only

and I knew
I had reached
the end of my journey

in the motherfather's arms
I wept.