(By Gub, Turkey)
Turkey astounds me
Mouths exploding with smoke
Lungs with courteous rhetoric
Landscapes bathed with ruined basilicas
Statues. Seascapes. Purple history
Greek, Roman, polygamous ottomans
Sensual kingdoms of texture, architecture, attire
And polymorphous deities - more gods than time to praise.
Surely the green, blue, grey eyes,
The cosmos rolling millennia into a granite ball
Has hurled its last from the Anatolian peninsular ?
What use for Olympians in the bubbled cellophane of
Tesco's fruit cultivation ?
And Heracles outside of the garden centre statuette ?
Man has sunk his gods
And with them, the deity of his nature.
He is bereft of soul
That vessel which one birthed
Whole cultures, civilisations
Is stranded
Locked into an iPod
An email
A tweet
His cosmos is software
Gods are apps
Constellations once stars in the heavens
Are contacts on Facebook
No longer lights to guide a ship by
But GPS signals - the dying of providence,
Of fate and faith in profane love
The ascent
Of man
More compassion
Less violence
And poverty
Maybe -
But in our souls we are bleeding
For civilisations weren't for the deification
Of man's right to survive at the expense of everything.
There were also admissions of humility, of limitations, of acceptances
The transient holiness of spirit breaking through generations and
histories
Until now they endured - absolute belief that all deities were greater
than we - that God was the greatest of all
The deities are all dead -
God may survive but only in fanatical pathology
We are alone with our virtual kingdoms
our viral universe
our tiresome language of branding all worlds the same.
All worlds end: stars explode/implode,
the rhythm of solar systems
still governed by unknown principles.
One day we may exploit the truth - but precedent shows only one constant.
Man never gets one over on the future.
