Child: New and Selected Poems 1991–2011

Mimi Khalvati

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9781847770943
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847779151
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Poetry
• Index: Literature

As it journeys through the author's life, this collection by Anglo-Iranian poet Mimi Khalvati explores childhood, motherhood, loss, eroticism, and the natural world. Lyrical and resonant, this compilation—haunted by the child-self that is never quite left behind—combines some essential selections of Khalvati's previous work with new poems. The poems feature traditional forms as well as experiments with the Ghazal, an ancient Persian form comprised of an unrhymed couplet.

IV

Vine Leaves

Even the vine leaves shot with sun

have shadow leaves

pressed close on them.

Even the vine is hanging

ones that seem like twos:

a top leaf

on a shadow leaf, its corner slipped,

like invoices in duplicate.

If I stood to look from the other side

with the light behind me,

would I still not see

how the top leaf shot with sun

might be the one that fails to fit

its duplicate

instead of

– standing where I do – seeing

how it is the shadow leaf that fails to fit

and failing

makes the one leaf seem like two

and being two, more beautiful?

The Love Barn

Remember the swallows – or were they

swifts? – in the love barn where the wooden

rail we peered over might have been

the height waves tip out of over

rocky pools or the bar of a certain

Sicilian café scattering waiters

like birds or the fence of a driveway

where lupins grow tall as you were

in the barnlight where we stood, leaning

over a railing, smelling the hay.

Ghazal

after Hafez

However large earth’s garden, mine’s enough.

One rose and the shade of a vine’s enough.

I don’t want more wealth, I don’t need more dross.

The grape has its bloom and it shines enough.

Why ask for the moon? The moon’s in your cup,

a beggar, a tramp, for whom wine’s enough.

Look at the stream as it winds out of sight.

One glance, one glimpse of a chine’s enough.

Like the sun in bazaars, streaming in shafts,

any slant on the grand design’s enough.

When you’re here, my love, what more could I want?

Just mentioning love in a line’s enough.

Heaven can wait. To have found, heaven knows,

a bed and a roof so divine’s enough.

I’ve no grounds for complaint. As Hafez says,

isn’t a ghazal that he signs enough?

Ghazal: To Hold Me

I want to be held. I want somebody near

to hold me

when the axe falls, time is called, strangers appear

to hold me.

I want all that has been denied me. And more.

Much more than God in some lonely stratosphere

to hold me.

I want hand and eye, sweet roving things, and land

for grazing, praising, and the last pioneer

to hold me.

I want my ship to come in, crossing the bar,

before my back’s so bowed even children fear

to hold me.

I want to die being held, hearing my name

thrown, thrown like a rope from a very old pier

to hold me.

I want to catch the last echoes, reel them in

like a curing-song in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS
• Iowa Daybook
• The Streets of La Roue
• Afterword
• Night Sounds
• River Sounding
• Cretan Cures
• The Poet’s House
• Notes
• About the Author
• Also by Mimi Khalvati from Carcanet Press
• Copyright