Visual Error
A poem by Rosa Jamali
Translated from original Persian into English by the author


Right at the center of universe
They opened my tied hands
And they let me go
This is the Land you have long yearned for…

(A dark thick veil was drawing black circles over my eyes
In a very early second, the time was set with my watch.
My hands hadn't been shaped yet,
They were immature
My dusty clay-made face
My Profile on a sculpture was the same since the Genesis
Just thick dark circles over my eyes
And my throat was silenced, its vibrations sealed and forbidden.

I've been blinded and ransomed to sit there and count tambourines that we had divided yesterday and finished the other day

I have been walking on rivers, splitting the seas
Ask the chronicle for how many years I split the seas

A tight eye pupil has encompassed the whole world
Yet me,
In desperate need of a 7 millimeter space to write on the margins of the pool
What are you speaking about?
You've been sleeping in my arms for so many years
Worms have covered the centre of universe
And this bending round shape which lingers for ever has dispatched me
What are you speaking about?
The Fahrenheit thermometer says
My temperature has increased one degree

Just the time we could reach the centre of the earth
We would be a landmark for you
Right, it's the land I desired for
It's pettier than what I had imagined
Its interior shell is peeling me off
They have told the sweepers to sweep us in a way nobody could be left
It's worth more than the cost of what has blinded me
It's excavating my throat tunnels
And this labyrinthine soil
Its lime shell
It's a land from here to seven millimeters there
I couldn't have dreamt this fragmented dream

They had untied my ropes
And I didn't know where my journey took me to, they had abandoned me on a wasteland, they didn't want me anymore!

Oh, wait, sister!
Wait
I have endured all this!

But this wound has left a scar on my body
The one which you cannot erase it
What are you speaking about?
While they have stolen the right hand of God
I have turned to a profile stone on this famine-stricken land
I have turned round and round to reach the most mysterious spot on this circle
Here is a piece of land to dig
With a naked torso of God
In the middle of a pool full of blood
How much do you pay for this labour?
The air which tightened my neck is blowing gustily
You are chasing me like a shadow
I'm a light and lantern on your shady way
It's two at midnight
Ask the chronicles for how many thousand years I have walked on the sea
We had come to watch the eclipse

Right at the time we stepped on the centre of the earth
Just a shady vein from my right atrium
Like a corner ends in a dead end alley
Oh, wait sister
Wait!

It was unprecedented
And had disappeared from my eyesight.