Like cracking an egg, the morning spills

over the mountain’s edge

 over the peak where Muhammed hid in a cave for three days

for his very life

and now, drinking tea on the roadside

I watch the same essential sky tip its featherweight

over the minarets and lavender facades of the Holy Place.

The people had all prayed long ago

with the bats still twittering among the arches

and sleepy cats and babies sprawled unmolested

over the thousand carpets of God’s wide house.

 

So we sat with our plastic tea and well-fumigated lungs

while great clouds of pigeons swirl over the square

and a herd of air-conditioned Iranians

load TVs and washing machines onto their bus roof.

The grizzled men sit on the first class marble steps

with wads of patience and money

while their women chatter merrily behind their veils.

They don’t seem miserable or neurotic about it

- only hypothetical me!

After all (rationalizing) any mode of dress, or un

must always seem outlandish to outsiders, mustn’t it?

The diplomatic kid from Louisiana, in her uniform of jeans at Jeddah

 - what, for that matter, is so emancipated about that?

Didn’t the Cretan lassies go topless, first!

Not to mention the Shilluk girls at home, today.

 

The neon signs and lamps switch off

and women with baskets of fresh bread, yoghurt, fruit and cheese

scurry back to their tall, thin houses screened and bent

in mazy alleys up and down the rocky flanks of the hills.

 

Perched on the top of Jebel Mecca itself

an old citadel squats, across the way

from the King’s new house

and the space-age tunnels burrowing underneath.

Double-decker buses and huge limousines

courteously unharrass the people

hurrying to and fro from the great portals of the mosque:

a glimpse of purely black and gold within, draws the eye inexorably

- that place where a new dimension is verged upon.

That power-point of a million billion aspirations

endlessly seething at the esoteric hub

of the Islamic wheel.

 

 

 

 

 

Jan 1985