Each summer, working there, I’d set off for <br />The fabled cities – Esfahan, Kashan, <br />Or Ecbatana, where Hephaestion died, <br />The poets’ towns – Shiraz and Nayshapour, <br />Or sites now hardly more than villages <br />Lapped by the desert, Na’in or Ardestan . . . <br /> <br />Their names now mean a dusty backstreet somewhere <br />Empty and silent in the vivid sunlight, <br />A narrow way between the high mud walls – <br />The worn wood of the doors recessed in them <br />A talisman to conjure and withhold <br />The life and lives I never touched or knew. <br />Sometimes I’d hear a voice, a radio, <br />But mostly there was silence and my shadow <br />Until a turn would bring me back to people, <br />Thoroughfares and shops . . . <br /> <br />Why is it this that stays, <br />Those empty afternoons that never led <br />To anything but seemed their own reward <br />And are more vivid in my memory <br />Than mosques, bazaars, companionship, and all <br />The myriad details of an eight year sojourn; <br />As if that no epiphany, precisely, <br />Were the epiphany? As Hafez has it, <br />To know you must have gone along that way; <br />I know they changed my life forever but <br />I know too that I could not tell myself <br />– Much less another – what it was I saw, <br />Or learnt, or brought back from those aimless hours.<br /><br />Dick Davis<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/iran-twenty-years-ago/
