Certified Copy, باغ بی برگی

Last night I saw, again, Kiarostami’s “Certified Copy,” which left me so much more to think about this time—as cinema, as poetry, as attachment, freedom, dependence and independence, as mirrors upon mirrors, as life, as happiness, as sadness. The film, set in Italy, is no less majestically Iranian than any of his others. This poem of Mehdi Akhavan Sales, “The Leafless Garden,” is mentioned briefly in passing. So, herewith, a Fall poem in Spring.

Here is the English translation:

The cloud with its cold damp skin
Has embraced the sky tightly;

The leafless orchard
Is alone day and night
With pure and sad silence.

Its lyre is the rain; its song, the wind,
Its garment a cloak of nudity,
And if another garment it must wear,
Let its warp and woof be woven in golden ray.

It can grow or not grow, whatever and wherever it wants or does not want;
There is neither gardener nor passerby.
The depressed orchard
Expects no spring.

If its eye sheds no warm luster
And on its face no leaf of smile grows,
Who says the leafless orchard is not beautiful?
It relates the tale of fruits, once reaching to heavens, now lying in the cold coffin of earth.

The leafless orchard,
Laughs in tearful blood,
Eternal, mounted on its wild yellow stallion,
It roams autumn, the king of seasons.