all these hatreds
back in action again
like iced-familiars

cold objects
gripped
by god-knows-what
certainties
thawed
by the heat of bodies,
smashed in the eyes of children

icons
waving in the glare of air
sultry and mild
atrophied
by the dust of centuries

sunlight stipples
the pock-marked churches
turned-mosques-turned-churches
turned mosques
as blitz-hardened women
spit out their venom
a little at a time

there's no breaking out of this thin space,
trapped in this time and place,
the shell-shocked people
tumbling right back to holy
Constantinople

dawn deformed by the lurid skies
men's eyes, glazed
by the fires of time,
look through the enemy air,
staring into the future
seeing only the past. 

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