#dnrpp

(This picture is about how Sa’adi’s Golestan--literally, land of flowers--came to be. In the full poem, Sa’adi is walking around in a flower garden with a someone who is picking flowers. Sa’adi moans about the ephemerality of flowers and proposes he make a book, the leaves of which will produce the beauty of flowers for all eternity. This couplet is the moment where the friend is like “OMG YOU HAVE TO DO IT!”)

A bluer sky A bluer water I'm on the balcony, Ra'na's by the pool Washing her clothes The leaves are falling My mother one morning said: It's a dismal season I said to her: Life is an apple, we should bite into its skin The neighbour's wife at her window knits and sings "I sing a goodbye song And knit a pattern of a rock, a bird, a cloud" A smooth sunbeam The starlings have come New wildflowers have been found I peel a pomegranate and say to myself It would be good if the seeds of people's hearts could be seen Pomegranate juice jumps in my eye: I shed tears My mother smiles Ra'na, too.

What have I to do with the long, savage howl In an animal's sexual organ? What have I to do with the lowly thrustings of a worm in a fleshy vaccuum? The bloody lineage of roses has bound me to existence. The bloody lineage of roses, you know?

Why should I stop? The path passes between the capillaries of life,  The Moon's nurturing womb Will kill the rotting cells.  And within the chemical space after sunrise  Is only the voice.  The voice that will melt into the atoms of time  Why should I stop?

Within country and kingdom, despair and ruin will fester When the counsel of the king pales to that of the shepherd.

I fear that tears will our sadness unveil And these secrets to the world reveal. They say: with patience, a stone to ruby turns And yes, it does, as a heart to pulp churns.

Come! Pour a new goblet of Wine and let us scatter the flowers We shall tear the sky asunder and cast ourselves a new day! If Sorrow raises an army that sheds the blood of Lovers Together, I and the Cup-bearer shall keep his forces at bay!

So in the garden blooms the rose and yet One cannot pluck it without suffering the thorn.