Armen Davoudian has an MFA from Johns Hopkins University and is currently a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University. His poems and translations from Persian appear in Poetry magazine, the Hopkins Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Swan Song, won the Frost Place Competition.
SWAN SONG
Armen Davoudian
after the Persian of Mehdi Hamidi Shirazi
They say when the time comes for a swan to die,
it goes where other swans have gone to die.
They say as the last night begins to fall,
it trails behind the setting sun to die.
And it sings ghazals, as though it wished between
the pages of its own divan to die.
They say a swan loves only once and will
return to where its love was won to die.
Making its deathbed where it first made love,
it can forget it has withdrawn to die.
Are these tales true? In the desert, where I live,
no swan has come, not a single one, to die.
But then they say that swans return to water,
in whose embrace life was begun, to die.
Open your arms, my dear, and slake my thirst:
the time has come for one more swan to die.