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,

Were 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,

The extermination had begun

Culminating in 1923, three million of us murdered,

Constantinople forced upon its knees:

At oh! such an unrecoverable cost.