#mimi khalvati

[majestativa]

Why do nightingales sing in the dark? Ask the radif, it will only say ‘it’s heartache’.

— Mimi Khalvati, The Meanest Flower, (2007)

[ukdamo]

Ghazal: To hold me

Mimi Khalvati

I want to be held. I want somebody dear to hold me in the wind and the rain when nobody’s near to hold me.

I want to be touched as the tree touches sky and sky touches earth so horizons appear to hold me.

I want to strike out as a flock strikes for home and home is now this, now that, warm hemisphere to hold me.

I want to uncoil a long river of hair, my beloved to sleep, to cross sleep’s frontier 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, hopes to run high 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 creel of my ear to hold me.

I want Rodolfo to sing, flooding the gods, Ah Mimi! as if I were her and he, here, to hold me.

[habibialkaysani]

if, when it ends, my dear husband, be my friend, muse, lover and guide, shamsuddin to my rumi. be heaven and earth to me and I’ll be twice the me I am, if only half the world you are to me.

[kitchen-light]

Mimi Khalvati - Ghazal: Of Ghazals

[soracities]

Oh would that I were bark! So old and still in leaf. / And you, dropping in my shade, dew to bedew me!

Mimi Khalvati, from ‘Ghazal’

[allyssablu]

I want to be held. I want somebody dear to hold me in the wind and the rain when nobody’s near to hold me.

I want to be touched as the tree touches sky and sky touches earth so horizons appear to hold me.

I want to strike out as a flock strikes for home and home is now this, now that, warm hemisphere to hold me.

I want to uncoil a long river of hair, my beloved to sleep, to cross sleep’s frontier 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, hopes to run high 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 creel of my ear to hold me.

I want Rodolfo to sing, flooding the gods, Ah Mimi! as if I were her and he, here, to hold me

MiMi Khalvati

[majestativa]

I do not think any great artist works in a fever. One returns from inspiration as from a foreign country.

Every artist climbs each step in the tower of his perfection by fighting his duende, not his angel

nor his muse. This distinction is fundamental. The angel dazzles, but he flies high over a man’s head.

The muse dictates and sometimes prompts. The muse and angel come from without; the angel

gives lights, and the muse gives forms. But one must awaken the duende in the remotest mansions of the blood.

— Mimi Khalvati, The Meanest Flower, (2007)

[seaanimalonland]

Amy’s Horse | Mimi Khalvati

Amy's horse looked doleful.  More pony than horse, he looked lugubriously out of his fingerprint eyes at me

from the huge front pane of night. Outside it was snowing, inside, orange then green then golden light

flashed through Amy's horse as if electricity could grant him life. He had two tails:  one short and stiff,

one, superimposed by Amy's friend, cursive and corrective.  Diamonds glittered in his outline, rainbeads

mapped him like a constellation. He was a Christmas decoration, the donkey of our childhoods risen

like a saint on a stained-glass pane. His eyes were mean and close-set, his mane a stumpy fringe, his face as lean

as any Christ's but what with the cold, the crowded bus, the sudden gold that flooded him, he seemed to hold

not only our eyes but all our anguish, the terrible burdens of our flesh and blood, for he had none, no flesh,

no body, nothing but an outline a finger traced on glass, a sign for the very naught we can't imagine.

And when Amy's friend erased what body he had, it recomposed that naught, whitening under the glaze.

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