Magic Lantern 

By Majid Naficy

        This turning wheel in which we are perplexed
        I compare to a magic lantern:
        The sun: a lamp, the world: a lantern
        And we ourselves as rotating forms.
                Omar Khayyam
My phantom came from a lamp
Hanging over a shop counter.
It projected shadows of a grocer and my mother
On a wall across the street
In the Friday nights of my childhood.
In the dark cave of our car
We sat waiting for Mother.
Father would point and say: “Look!
The grocer is putting cheese on the scale
Now he is wrapping it in paper
Now he is taking money from your mother.”
I watched in amazement
Wishing Mother would not return soon
And Father would not start the car
So that I could gaze longer
At the shadow play on the wall.
Now my father sleeps in shadows
And my mother who lives alone
Goes to visit him every Friday evening
And I ask myself, like Plato:
Was this all real or a phantom?
        July 18, 2010
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