Poem for a Free Iran

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Sultan of Qom is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the green republics;
They have dashed the white flag of peace.
And the Lord upon the Golden Tulip is laughing, even as he sleeps.

Akhound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(And Derafsh-e Kaviani is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Yazdeguerd was king.

They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,-
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Akhound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the sun-worshipping folk may hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase these Pahlavans flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces twenty six years ago:

They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign -
(But Derafsh-e Kaviani has now burst through the battle-line!)
Pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Javid-bad Shah!
Payandeh-bad mihane gerami!
Derafsh-e Kaviani has
set his people free!