عشق آمریکایی من (دوازده. دیدار از دیوار)

My American Love

        Thirty-Two Poems for Wendy

Twelve.

Visiting the Wall

by

Majid Naficy

We climbed the Great Wall of China

And reached the second watchtower

Where a narrow, dark minaret

Joined the blue sky.

There, I saw three poets of Tang dynasty:

Wang Wei, the monk,

Li Bo, the mystic

And Du Fu, the sage.

They were looking at the deep valley

From the top of the balcony.

I told them that I have read Sutra

And have heard scattered narratives

Of Lao Tse and Confucius,

And yet, since my adolescence

I have only been attached to their poetry

Which, like the cypress of Chu-Ko Liang temple,

Has deep, ancient roots.

All three remained silent.

And only Du Fu smiled.

Then we descended the mountain

And bought Great Wall t-shirts

From an Uyghur girl peddler,

Who had almond-shaped eyes

Like Afaq, the love of the Persian poet Nezami.

Finally we sat on a stone seat in a tavern

And ordered a jug of rice wine

With a basket of fragrant lychees.

While a pet cricket

Was silent in his gourd cage,

I recited Du Fu’s “Great Wall” poem

For my traveling companion, Wendy:

“Riding horses, advancing in the blizzard

A pale line of people climb the mountain.

At their posts, they grab dangerous cliffs

Feeling ice sheets under their fingers.

They have left their homelands long ago

And don’t know when their forced labor is over.

At sunset, they envy the clouds floating toward the south:

Can these clouds carry our messages back home?”

July 30, 2011

POEMS: 1. On the Bridge, ۲. I Hope the Water Returns, ۳. Empty Baskets ۴. Coffee Maker ۵. Anxious Heart ۶. Washing ۷. Bougainvillea ۸. Simple Truth ۹. Persian-Singing Bird ۱۰. The Gardener ۱۱. Lost Cypresses ۱۲. Visiting the Wall