Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi

The Only Witness

For Rashid

Not the heaps of your love letters
In the velvet chest of memories;

Not the armful of flowers and fruits
You bring home in the evenings;

Not even the gold bracelet of 18 carats
You give me on our wedding anniversary;

The only witness to your pure love,
this pale plastic bin heavy with rubbish,

which you carry down from the fourth floor, step by step,
refusing the help of my sleepy hands night by night!

Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi is a poet, translator and freelance journalist.  Her first book of poetry was published when she was twenty-two.  Her poems appear in the anthologies Contemporary Women Poets of Iran and Anthology of Best Women Poets. She is the author of The Last Night with Sylvia Plath: Essays on Poetry. She has extensively translated World literature into Persian.  Among her several publications are: Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Marina Tsvetaeva, Blaga Dimitrova, Iroslav Seifert, Anthology of Contemporary African Poetry, Women Poets of the World, Twentieth Century Latin American Poetry Pablo Neruda:(A Passion for Life), and The Beauty of Friendship: Selected Poems by Khalil Gibran. Her latest work is Anthology of American Poetry.