These are the unpurged images of day.
The King of the moon came looking for me
blood dripping from his mouth,
a wide toothy smile as wide as the Bosphorus.

Aristomenos, daughter of Ancient Man,
did everything a man can to remain Byzantine.
But the Ottomans raped her and laughed at her and smoked hashish.

She asked herself what the ancient Greeks said about murder
and so refrained. Uttering such-and-such platitudes
she reassured her acolytes that conversion was good and submitted.

Most of the Greeks who had survived trusted her sincerity,
and they and their sons and their fathers became Muslim.
They no longer exalted the mysteries of belief.

The few who refused conversion committed suicide or fled west
or were crucified or kept alive and taunted
by those who had adopted the new dispensation.

Converts were worse than the Janissaries,
Christian boys from the Balkan provinces
forcibly converted to Islām
on being drafted into the Ottoman military service.

This is how a civilization crumbles..