Two lines from the Rubaiyat.
On our one free day we went to Naishapur
in Ahmed’s black Mercedes, with his pride
an inbuilt record player, which only took one disc.
The date is forgotten, more than forty years ago,
but I remember that day on the Old Silk Road.
I hadn’t read the Rubaiyat, but knew of Omar Khyyam
and the Silk Road to Naishapur sounded like a poem.
After months in crowded Mashad, the journey was a promise
of travel at leisure, a sense of stolen time, but
the real theft was colour, in a land of reddish brown,
tarnished by the nearness of the Great Salt Desert,
the North Eastern edge of Dasht-e Kavir.
Between the shouldering peaks of Binälüd and Sorkh
we drove down the arid valley of the Sabzevär river
along steep dry waddi’s that cut under the road.
There were minimal signs of any civilising presence,
our passing stirred the dust in a silent static vastness.
By midday we reached the memorial garden.
Khyyam’s grave was imprisoned by a concrete grotto
rebuilt five years before in a heavy handed style –
the only gentle lightness the poet would have noticed
were the thin blowsy roses in the sun baked earth.
I had travelled for inspiration, but arrived under-whelmed.
Photographs were taken, which later developed poorly,
and in silence we turned for the long journey home.
Part way, in the desert, we halted for the silence,
which was gradually eroded by a distant murmur
infinitesimally growing to an overwhelming roar,
then stopped
as the police motorcyclist stalked to the car.
A lengthy conversation was fodder for his boredom,
paid for with directions to a ruined caravanserai.
Up an unmade track it slumped roofless but walled,
long empty and neglected on the real Silk Road.
Once used by Marco Polo, so local legend told.
In the shattered courtyard, I stared straight into rooms
where travellers had rested, and history had strayed.
Did the smell of their camels still in hang in the air?
Was that smoke from the cook fires, spice from the East,
was the breeze jingling harness, did the sun glint from steel?
The details froze forever yet nothing was real
but anything was possible and the nexus was me.
There was a Door to which I found no key:
There was a Veil past which I could not see:
* Ivor Murrell is a regular IS&T contributor who has just come from a blast of Suffolk County New York, a workshop and reading by the American contemporary beat poet George Wallace. “An energy to nullify the rite of sleep! What a way to start the year!” He says of this piece “It addresses one of those all too infrequent moments when enchantment, beauty, poetic moment actually all resolve to the same coincidence – a one point of epiphany, aesthetic, emotional, spiritual – when you're breath-taken. This one occurred to me 43 years ago and the event is time locked. The photograph is one of the poor batch that I took of Khyyam’s tomb that day.”