Poem: Akkad's Jackal
#Gaza #FreePalestine From Ireland to Palestine, a poem of solidarity. Revolution until victory.
Image: Head of King Sargon of Akkad, c. 2300 BC, found in Nineveh, Iraq
"If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" —William Shakespeare (The Merchant of Venice; Act 3, Scene I)
'We have no friends but the mountains.' - Kurdish saying.
I.
The cupbearer lends an ear to his king’s worries,
planting power-dreams, weaving a webbed delusion
to hammer calm through the flux of peace.
Base deeds attend him. His name is a grating oath,
hissed on the tongue of savage and scribe; both
know not to trust his oratory, where silence ebbed.
Then, just as now, pilgrims knelt to sing
for the veiled and perfumed temple whore,
her lips beestung, charcoal hair spilling
past her ribs, thighs parted for a holy orgasm,
her breasts sanctified, scented and lissom,
bored of rusty myths, of men at work and war.
II.
The cupbearer lends an ear to his king’s worries
as truck-wheels grind the border – APCs barrelling
roughshod and rusty. Drones fall back, fires cease
at the whim of some Marine Corps golden-ager
from his desk in Arlington, calmly on-site in flyover
country. Now, with the airstrikes and re-fuelling
of death-planes at Shannon Airport, what mosaic
shall be grouted of it all? Cuneiform frozen
in flint and time, lacuna-scarred narus? For the sake
of toppling statues, keep etching out, word for merciless word,
the bone-white script onto kiln-cooked hard
copy, party lines for infantryman and insurgent.
III.
Brute force, smoking nostrils, armoured bone
of Behemoth and Humbaba, the cedar-lord
shook the desert and left city-states to burn,
their entrails piled as collateral damage
for the Sumerian laid to rest at the world’s edge,
all renown proven by his skill with a sword.
But it’s neither gods nor monsters who authorise
the point-blank searchlight, air-to-surface runs
over Aleppo, Gaza begrimed in white phosphorus,
or the walls of Uruk, prized as copper, crumbling
to the soil. At this global brink, men are stumbling
to self-made demolition, cast in bronze.
IV.
Sargon’s copper skull hovers on display
in a Baghdad museum, the left eye gouged out,
the whittled beard, once changeable as clay,
woven as thornily as the basket that ferried him
downriver to his royal destiny, now time-dim
and vandalised. Cupbearer, caliphate
or conqueror, he hears the new tremor of a storm,
trebly plink of rain stirring the blackened tendril,
the lone plant bristling in the desert, swarm
of jungle vine and petals, ripening anew
for his pantheon of winged bull and Apkallu,
daunting the jackals where they prowl.
V.
The cupbearer lends an ear to his king’s worries
until the victory stele salutes his own accession.
There is collateral in the making of policies
with kiln-cooked oaths hissed on scholarly tongues,
troops withdrawn from the province of songs.
And who will be left to claim succession
after his death, his bejewelled name, the iron-clad
sun hoodwinking men to their own undoing?
He wants no part of the future he’s built, glad
to see his name etched on ziggurat and bas-relief,
his face on clay pots, and the cracked sheaf
of narus, the level drum, or its bruised tattooing.
© Daniel Wade, 2017.