Weijia Pan

A Man Writes a Ghazal, A Son Grows Up, and What Nostalgia Tells Us

A man speaking Farsi for the first time in forty years is writing a ghazal.

He inundates his page with tears and half rhymes, a father

recollecting a pond where, many summers ago,

he lost his five-year-old son. When sorrow wakes him up

who’s going to stop him? Neglect is pain. A bucket’s growling

emptiness by a dried-up well below a mountain is pain

stirred up by the wind. In Houston, my lower lip blisters.

Someone who tweets no food during the lockdown in Shanghai

is suddenly my friend. There’s so much I can’t say

in a gasp, as when a bird lifts off, or, when I push

an herbal pill through the foil, a chronic pain

arises in my stomach.

It asks me to call bà and mā, but searching

for ideograms on my mind’s eroding tablet, I know

my speech is limited to this: that my life is colorful

because it really is worrisome, that another Asian gets killed

but it’s far from where I live, the safest city on the planet.

I remember reading an Arthur Sze poem; a girl took out

her glass eye, and the boy who’d always loved her

knew that he’d see the world a little better, a little

more cruelly. Is lying a better form

of caring? Consider politics: a sea of lies

that my friends and I talked about all night

until the moon could no longer divide

the water and the mind, and I thought

of a border skirmish on TV

when the winning side announced our retaliatory bullets

entered their chests before their vengeful shells reached us

which was the best diplomatic retort

I’d ever seen from any regime. How imaginative.

How brazen. When a man writes a ghazal,

does nostalgia attack him first, or does he try to end

this civil war with himself?

He left his family for the U.S.

so he could start anew, give himself another son,

a shady afternoon to plant all the daisies,

and forty years for his son to mature

and love him. I’ve watched this son again and again

in the stoutness of his thirties

pulling into his driveway, locking his car,

taking a deep breath before knocking on the door.

How amazing this is, again: a family, a house,

a street of leaves in a good neighborhood

that only whispers to him at night: Go home!

But he’s sound asleep then, and doesn’t know

I made him up for this poem.

Rebirth

The night’s drumming on tree trunks

with deepening cracks. On houses

bolted like cartons of truths. The grass

gives a low hum that stirs the branches

that hold a nest. A fledging heartbeat.

The fledgling is dead. Some boys

shot it down. They crouched weary-eyed

below the porch and when the sun

dimmed a little, their eyes widened.

Like a dead fish’s. Like the full

tangerine, skin peeled off and curled

on my table. At night I stare

as if a hatchling will crawl out of it.

Clean it with water. Keep it warm

with my palm. Cup it like a child’s face,

safe for its narrow, blue veins.

When a life is kicked into being, it carries

the will to live and the cruelty

to destroy. The boys make slingshots,

wrapping rubber around the wooden Y.

The sparrows arrive with fresh worms

and twigs. The tangerine I nurture in my hands

will never hatch a bird. A bird

is a bird’s masterpiece. A boy

is a king starting his kingdom.

His slingshot is modified with double

passion and when a decree is given

by the mind, the eyes and hands follow.

Now the sky is lacquered and the boys

have left. They were looking for the new target.

The skin of the fledgling they turned over

glared in the last streak of sun. A red spot

near the gutter. It darkens. The sky

grumbles, but will it cry?