poem, poetry, student protests, Muslim Spain, The Bacchae

CORDOBA

I was in medieval Cordoba
at the height of its power
and its prestige,

when I found myself, perhaps
having blinked too hard,
in Paris May ’68 and
then in
Times Square New York
sometime yesterday
or maybe tomorrow

watching an Empire slowly
grind itself down to powder

whilst somewhere in these
crowds a Holy prophet and
Christ incarnation
is quietly, deliberately,
avoiding the vanity that
feasts upon
supreme spectacle
(Naomi’s false idol)

searching for what was
lost, destroyed,
that it be found, healed,
restored,
re-established in
single searing moment
of absolute connection

meanwhile
in a playhouse in the centre
of Philadelphia, an outraged
Dionysus plots
King Pentheus’s demise

his worshippers find themselves
swept up by a force
beyond the power
of resistance
awake to the reality
of a primal, divine
revenge
soaked in the blood of
their rapture,

egged on by the god to cross
the presumed defining linit
of humanity itself m.

Signs and wonders:
we so desperate that they
submit
to our systems
not rupture the fabric
of meaning itself