The Village Well by Sholeh Wolpé
The Village Well
From Rooftops of Tehran
You were children, curious. Something splashed
in the belly of the well and she took your hand, descended
into the mouth opened wide,
step by concrete step down its dark spiral throat.
The creature that unhinged the damp stillness
of that well was not a man, not an animal–
just the silhouette of something vast….
You thought it was God, she thought it was djinn,
and then you with fear did not think at all, running back up
breathless, the chill of the well at your heels.
That night you didn’t wait for his leg to accidently
rub against yours, or his hand accidentally brush
your thigh as it always did, away from eyes that never
blinked. Instead, you reached for his knee, the flesh and bone
of this gray man who pretended to be daddy’s friend. Beneath
the table laden with almond rice your mother had lovingly cooked,
the saffron-stewed lamb, the chicken smothered in herbs…
you squeezed,
squeezed so hard his eyes turned your direction and melted
into a watery scream like the one still rising in the throat of that well.
Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, visual artist and playwright. She is the author of Sin—Selected Poems of Forugh Farrokhzad (University of Arkansas Press), The Scar Saloon (Red Hen Press), Rooftops of Tehran (Red Hen Press, Jan. 2008), Shame (a play in three acts) and has a Poetry CD featuring poems read by the author to traditional Persian music (Refuge Studios). She is the associate editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern Literature from the Muslim World (Norton, 2010) and her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in scores of literary journals, periodicals and anthologies worldwide, and have been translated into several languages. Sholeh was born in Iran but spent most of her teen years in the Caribbean and Europe, ending up in the U.S. where she pursued Masters degrees in Radio-TV-Film (Northwestern University ) and Public Health (Johns Hopkins University ). She is the recipient of several awards for her poetry. She lives in Los Angeles.