پدر پدران – بیست‌و‌یک شعر برای پدرم / مجید نفیسی (۱۴)

The Father of Fathers
        Twenty-One Poems for My Father

Fourteen.

Magic Lantern 

By Majid Naficy

        This turning wheel in which we are perplexed
        I compare to a magic lantern:
        The sun: a lamp, the world: a lantern
        And we ourselves as rotating forms.
                Omar Khayyam

My phantom came from a lamp
Hanging over a shop counter.
It projected shadows of a grocer and my mother
On a wall across the street
In the Friday nights of my childhood.

In the dark cave of our car
We sat waiting for Mother.
Father would point and say: “Look!
The grocer is putting cheese on the scale
Now he is wrapping it in paper
Now he is taking money from your mother.”

I watched in amazement
Wishing Mother would not return soon
And Father would not start the car
So that I could gaze longer
At the shadow play on the wall.

Now my father sleeps in shadows
And my mother who lives alone
Goes to visit him every Friday evening
And I ask myself, like Plato:
Was this all real or a phantom?

        July 18, 2010

Poems

۱: Sword at the Ablution Pool, ۲:  In Temescal Canyon, ۳: Red earmuffs, ۴: Three Gifts, ۵:  Forgetfulness, ۶: That Hitler Moustache, ۷: Baghbaderan Wine, ۸: The Night, ۹: Visiting the Moon, ۱۰: Secret, ۱۱:  A Red Rose for My Father, ۱۲: The Soul Bird of Father, ۱۳: In the Name of Father, ۱۴: Magic Lantern, ۱۵: The Family Koran