Desert City Poems

Hello everyone,
I hope you enjoy my first post. These three poems are deliberately romantic.
They go in a series of poems: half in this 'Arabian Nights Fantasy' style and half in 'Urban Realistic' style set in the Middle East. These are the only ones I have stopped fiddling with, so I guess they are done.
Heather Marsh



DESERT CITY POEM ONE

Slower than dust
the carpet seller rises
with the air of one whose quietude is spoiled.

Indifferent to commerce he chooses a single rug and lays it out.
A tilt of brow says "sit".
Apple-spiced and steaming tea is poured,
the hookah passed with smoke and musk-stained fingers.

Then he speaks; languidly, placidly
of the sands and recent storms,
a quarrel in the senate,
the quality of figs at market brought by passing caravans and

all the while watching with lidded eyes your gaze
transfixed

by endless patterns and motifs
complex, dazzling
silk and metal threads entwining
weft and warp in infinite play
forming arabesques, diamonds, vines, hyacinths,
prayer arches, eight-pointed stars,
running dogs, snakes, horses,
A feild of rose with
blue, green, saffron chasing fugitive red...

His mantra
then silence

A question
and relieved your answer: "Yes!"
"Yes- how beautiful it is- that rug"

For the first time he smiles and
with deliberate fingers
parts you from your purse.


DESERT CITY POEM TWO

The floor of her chamber is a pool
of clouded glass and
lapis adorns her slippers

If liquid gold for nectar she desired
gilded her lips would be

Would she but sup, the Kingdom would starve
that no sweet fruit or spice be denied her

The gifts of Princes: oils and salves
which in their caskets lie neglected,
could perfume the East

The tears of her suitors,
disconsolate in their finery,
could fill an ocean
but never touch the distant shore
of her parched heart,

nor still its cry of longing to the night
whose lament is echoed by
every beggar in the city.


DESERT CITY POEM THREE

Behind the market, in the grocers lane
at the starless hour before dawn,
a child awakes from the lap of sleep
where a dream had taught him a history:

Of the land where men are blind
and walk with outstretched arms
across a gossamer thread that
stretches from the beginning of the world
to the end of time.

Beneath the thread is the land of the djinn;
A chasm of nameless terrors
from which the laughing demons fly.

They fly with their furious breath
and topple, staring and sightless, a boy
a child, a grocers son
toward terror and silence.

Falling he wakes,
his brow a sequined stone
and begins the wail that will rouse all the dogs
from here to the temple.