The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles

Marco Polo

67 Marco Polo Ali Alizadeh Maybe it’s the natural extension of immigration. Maybe it’s the awesome travel bugs, making my wife’s feet uncommonly itchy. I’m not surprised, at any rate, to hear the pediatrician’s nickname for our son. ‘Marco Polo’ suits his—in utero—trajectory along the Silk Road, from Kublai Khan’s Forbidden City to the snow-covered stones of a caravanserai in central Turkey. Not to mention the Australian interregnum where ultrasound scans revealed his sex. But our Marco probably won’t pen a Travels as he won’t know the other side of unending expedition, say cherished waterways of Venice, in short a concrete home. Are we monstrous parents? Why have we conceived 68 and delivered a life unto the world in transition? If held to account by a solicitous young man with my eyes (and my wife’s better eyebrows) one day, accused of depriving him of his deserved comforts of sedentary genesis (motherland, mother tongue two ebullient grandmothers, etc.) I can only offer an image: removing picture frames, tribal ornaments from the hooks; clearing the drawers of wrinkled notepads with withered ideas and perforated socks; tearing the hooks off the walls. And then the bright outline of the picture frames vacated on the otherwise drab dust-darkened surface of the wall. It’s this record of the passage of time the contrast between the original shade and color and the rest (ditto our lives) dog-eared 69 by mould, sunlight, scratches of nature and accidents. It’s this visible discrepancy between what we were and what we’ve become, the chance to uncover and see it. The nomads treasure, wisdom: the reality of aging towards death. You see, Marco —I’ll tell him—if we can see death looming, like a dark island on the navigator’s horizon then we won’t be shocked when time’s run out. This means a life without our primal fear. That’s why we travel. ...