Persian poetry at the Bodleian Library

Goatskin cover, with green background laquer, of a manuscript copied in 1569

"Love and devotion from Persia and beyond", an exhibition of manuscripts that has travelled to the Bodleian Library from the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, runs till 28th April 2013. If you can't get to Oxford, you can explore the exhibition at leisure online. A cogent, useful introduction to each section sets the scene, followed by clickable thumbnails of beautiful book pages, with descriptions that get you noticing things. And there is video and audio at www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Out hunting, with a slave girl

While you're on the site, you might want to explore the other online exhibitions, for example "Treasures of the Bodleian" or "Crossing borders: Hebrew manuscripts as a meeting-place of cultures". The library has done a fabulous job of putting their exhibitions on line.

The Bodleian has a tempting bookshop, too! (image from here)

Looking for a modern persian poem, I found these poems from Iran, from which this poem by Farah Afshari comes, and also (for physical context) the photo of the persian garden -

Hand painted dreams

Alike the silence of a dream

Forgotten by dawn

Not to be remembered

but in broken pieces of no meaning...

.

Alike that coming moment

That brings no tomorrow

But takes away  today ...

Alike me walking behind my shadow

.

Leaving the dark traces of memories behind

Turning back and  nothing to see

Lost at the beginning of no-ways ahead

Searching for what might have been

What should have been in places

I have  already been

.

Alike me walk with me

In this grey garden of  green remembrance

Where every fallen leaf dreams of

That last unfinished  dance 

And  in the dry vain of every branch

A picture of blue sky lives

And  the sweetness of  that lost spring

That lost spring that will  never grow green

Is forever  green

Is forever  green

Walk with me in the land of hand painted dreams

.

I will grow  dreamlike

Dreamlike  but tall

Dreamlike  but green

Farah Afshari