for the riches of a Khan.

The memory of El Alamein burnt away any vestige of Tobruk.

The Casbah is my twain that confirms East & West shall never meet.

The False Prophet is in abundance, notwithstanding Western civilization's fierce resistance to his ideas.

Minarets, prayer rugs face Mecca five times daily while
opium on a mother's breast induces premature death in
unwanted infant girls.

The purdah is an eerie monologue between the feminine
form and purloined courage.

Mysticism juxtaposes carnal delight in the halls of the
Saladein's concubines.
Harems & the seraglios are the coveted date wine.

In Cape Bojador, there lurks a primeval instinct,
a nagging supposition all is not right with Araby.

The bath, the cloying sweetness of duplicity,
stirs amidst trenchant eyes.

Marmelukes are more than adventure book fiction
in the silent quarters.

The swirling dust, the prohibition of alcoholic drink,
are dervishes in the hadji's brain.

Everywhere, the ragged people cluster,
almsgiving becomes a prayer in the saline night.

Any but the Moslem faith caught in the pilgrimmage
to Mecca meet swift death.

The shopfronts with their bronzed clatter,
decantered gold, near haggling that becomes
the economics of plea bargaining, wits
desire against pressing need.

Debarking from Algeciras, facing the sublime North African
desert as her colours coil, pitch forward amongst the hills,
squares this continent's personality against the Occident.

Europe found other continents soft butter to her trenchant blade.

Here, she must consider herself matched with the heady dictates of survival.
1 6, 17, 18

***************************************************************

COLD PASSION

Some dead undid undid their bushy jaws,
and bags of blood let out their flies.. .
-- Dylan Thomas

The land is barren
wears straw wisps
as an unkempt man
might razor stubble.

The land is dry, a faded yellow
in its barrenness.
A sky broods from afar,
a stalactite sun accounts merely a jot
above that thin road into despair.

Grass lies everywhere dead,
faded tongues above an
earth afflicted with scleroderma,
deadliest of skin disturbances,
forerunner of deeper pestilence.

An erasing wind whips the fields
further into bereavement;
turns tiny bits of chaff to pursue themselves
in a mad St. Vitus dance