Byzantine
My love didn’t come from nowhere.
My father was a bastard, a sailor on the seas,
My mother just a peasant
Spent her life upon her knees.
The noblesse oblige:
The drinking and the drugs,
Was countered by Intelligence
And a tingling in the blood.
We were the late Romans
Much diminished and now, finally, gone.
For since the death-stroke of 1453,
When we heard Mehmed’s order to make
St Sophia’s cathedral, a mosque,
Constantinople has been forced upon its knees:
At oh! such an unrecoverable cost.
Dominic James
Mon 13th Feb 2017 08:28
Hi John
I bow to your superior authority. I think we must find our separate points in the river of history depending on our argument. And I note, by the way, on the Greek/Christian/Gnostic side of the overlap, Sophia herself was never entirely to be relied on.
I was in Istanbul a couple of summers ago. Marvellous, so far all I have to show for it, rather trivially:
In Istanbul
Since no basilisk weighs on the entrance
to the cistern’s shallow writhings – carp,
pooled about Medusa’s upturned mask –
and since the Lonely Planet Guide is wrong –
the Aya Sofia’s doors are open
on Monday after all – we have taken
a ferry ride to the holy city
of Byzantium, her patisseries
are more than any woman could ask for.
The Grand Bazaar we’ve walked, until we faltered
because our feet had blistered so, got lost in mosques,
we were in awe of stippled mosaics
in the emperor’s lush quarters, his apartments,
and have crawled back thus to the Bosphorus:
across the disturbed waters’ early dusk
as overheard the mauve clouds belly full
for – though tired, old – we have accomplished
four of five best things to do in Istanbul.