The day mama came home was always an event.
Gliding back into our English home with the grace of a lion
She brought us her salvaged remnants from a land of
dead liberty
Like the offering of a baby deer
she wished she hadn't killed.

When the last spicy promises of far away were diffused
with chips and smoke
and the roasted pistachios sat cold in a foreign dish of glass,
When the rugs began their slavery of dust catching
and all the trinkets of Ali Baba's cave had claimed my place by the fire-
When the Gods were sitting poised
and the moons were all in place,
She would reveal the real piece of the Middle East.
The golden oil she'd brought just for me.

Inside the hot pulse of the desert-skin drum
a madrigal honey of saffron violas
fills her palace with the dark orange embers of hell
and flickering war flames from her feet
the dangerous princess dances before me
Howling crimson prayers to a God
who's sick of listening
and ripping fleshy thorns from her spinning soul
barbed morsels of snake charming venom
from her small tortured body,
She spits out the songs of the dead
in an orchestra of severed tongues
that never tasted justice.

And those verbal grenades she daringly smuggled,
their arrogant metal heads softly concealed
under marble cakes of opium,
begin to twitch and stir-
dying to be touched.

The times I would hear faint scratches of crying
dribbling down the stairs to fill the cracks in the converstion
and following the stream- you were there at the source,
Clutching the edge of the bath with a bottle of bleach,
Weeping in a smashed reflection.
And leaking from your eyes
The usual image of a thousand crucifixions
Gave you seven years' bad luck.

And for the second time
You bled for me.