Poem

A few days ago, I encountered three lines of a poem in a report about the protests in Iran.  A protester sang the lines to the reporter, translating them for his benefit:

We should go under the rain.
We should wash our eyes,
And we should see the world in a different way.

The lines stayed with me, and I resolved to find the poem from which they had been excerpted.  It took a bit of digging, but I found it.

The poem is by Sohrab Sepehri and is called “The Sound of Water’s Footsteps.”  The translation is poor, but it hardly matters.  Even hobbled by language, it is a marvellous poem.

Now, I’m not a literary scholar, so I don’t know why it is marvellous.  But when I read this

Life is getting wet time after time.
Life is swimming in the pond of ‘Now.’

Let us take off our robes:
Water is only a step ahead.

I wanted to swim more than anything else in the world.