Kate Clanchy
To Travel
(after the Finnish of Gosta Agren)
If you should go to Samarkand
you might find Scheherazade
reproduced a thousand times,
tinsel-clad, in gift shops,
and Al-al-Din’s gold-plated domes
slung with Soviet tourist signs
and tarnished, on a brassy sky.
But staying is a kind of leaving.
From here, the fields of Oxfordshire
stretch already sovereign-golden.
And when the wheat is rolled in bales
like wheels, and black tractor rills
run to the bare horizon, there shall be,
in the wordless autumn air, Samarkand,
the idea of Samarkand.
Editor’s Note: The above poem appeared with a typo in Thumbscrew 12. Apologies to poet and readers.
Page(s) 29
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