I worked my way up by my wits, from clerk
to city Patriarch. I corrected
each schism, effaced the iconoclasts,
until our gilded streets turned black. And red.
In broken churches we counted the deaths.
I remembered a reed-slim boy of nine
or ten, the taste of his salt lips on mine –
weed-choked detritus dragged from Golden Horn.
Now terms were defined in my Lexicon.
I started with alpha: Abdeluktos.
Above blame. Any heretics tortured,
maimed. Absent of guilt. All Jews slaughtered.
[ b’del’uk’tos]. A sword hissing through bone.
Absolved. Assaults washed clean by each fresh gloss.
Josephine Balmer’s collections include The Word for Sorrow (Salt, new edition: 2013) and Chasing Catullus (Bloodaxe, new edition: 2016). Her translations include Catullus: Poems of Love and Hate (2004), Classical Women Poets (1996) and Sappho: Poems and Fragments (1992), all published by Bloodaxe.
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 05 Oct 2016 issue of the New Statesman, Trump's triumph