Repost from Substack
In February 1967, after only 32 rebellious years on this earth, Forough Farrokhzad died in a car accident. I find it strange how often poets seem to pre-figure their own deaths in their poetry, casting a poignancy back into their work, as though even as they die, they write. This poem ties death and poetry together. In it, Farrokhzad writes of passageways, roads, and roadsides.
Of course, a poet could die in any manner and, should they have written enough, a reader can find a casting forward somewhere. But I've learnt that we can choose to call coincidence beauty and we can let the interstices of the universe map out a pattern instead of a chaos, for what else tells us more about the miracle of the human mind than our capacity to do so?
I don't know how I will die. Yet, I think I know some ways I almost certainly won't. I have some ideas about more likely ways and less likely ways I could go. I wonder if we all have such instincts, when we spend a moment to think about it. Then, alongside, there's the cold hard truth: most of the way we think about our own deaths is pure fantasy. However you want to read it, here's Farrokhzad's striking poem:
Much Later
One day my death will come:
In a sound bright and awash
with light a long winter thick with fog
or an autumn empty of cries and dust
One day my death will come:
One of those bittersweet days
an empty day like all other days
a shadow of today's, of yesterdays!
My eyes like dim passageways
My cheeks like cold marble
Suddenly sleep will seize me
I'll pass beyond screams of pain
Freed from poetry's spell, slowly my fingers
will trace the face of my notebook
I'll remember that the blood of poetry
once blazed in my hands
Every moment the soil will call me to itself
People will arrive to bury me
Ah, maybe at midnight my lovers
will place a flower on my sad grave
After me the dark veils of my world
will suddenly pull away from me
Unfamiliar eyes will pry into
my papers and notebooks
After me a stranger who remembers me
will enter my little room
Beside the mirror there is still
a strand of hair, a handprint, a comb
I'll be free of myself and stand apart from myself
Whatever is left will be ruin
Like a boat's sail my soul
will grow distant and hidden on the horizon
Days and weeks and months
will all impatiently hurry off
Waiting for a letter your eyes
will stare into the eyes of the roads
But then the clinging of the soil of the tomb
will press on my cold body
Without you, far from the beating of your heart
my heart will rot there under the soil
Much later rain and wind will gently wash away
my name from the face of my headstone
By the side of the road my grave will remain
nameless, free of the stories about me
Translation by Elizabeth T Gray.