Sinai

Yellow scrub, harsh sand, purple peaks far off across the plain:
Battlefield of millennia, hallowed by countless armies’ blood,
Littered with burned-out tanks and trucks, barbed wire, shell casings, jerry cans.
High on its sandstone plinth stands Serabit, temple of Hathor,
Sanctuaries, pylons, porticoes, altars, steles and walls, still intact,
Untouched since the ancient Egyptians abandoned the turquoise mines
Where Semitic slaves hunched, hacking for their lives..
There, on the rock face, their inscriptions survive,
Primal alphabet, etched in faith and suffering,
The Word made manifest, mothering peoples and worlds.

Phantom white sun through haze and dust,
The gathering khamsin’s harbinger;
Solid heat reeks of death and despair,
Black flintstone glowers to the drifting horizons.
Piles of bleached stones guard the oasis stream,
Graves of Bedouin who ride now in death’s dimension,
Under tamarisk and acacia, where desert larks woo.
Little man, would you learn forbidden things?
The vulture killed and buried for forty days and nights,
Then boiled to the bone, will foretell the future;
The first white bone will summon a rushing genie
To reveal the secrets of nature to his ward.

Isolate in immense night, owl stars countless all around,
You are nothing but a fallen star, all dust and dream.
A flaming meteor streaks suddenly to earth,
And the brute sun shoulders over the world’s brink,
Firing the brush with partridge cackles.

Against the sheer granite at the foot of Mount Sinai,
St Catherine’s monastery is a tiny cut diamond refracting the sky.
Inside, in the airless ossuary, myriads of jumbled skulls and bones
Confabulate in the gloom. Archepiscopal crania
Brood like Celtic totems in niches thick with dust.
A skeleton cowled and resplendent in purple embroidered robe
Sits, propped up on the qui-vive, cocked head shyly questioning,
Finger-bones clutching a staff and rosary,
Feet-bones protruding from under his hem;
The remains of Saint Stephanos, who once dwelled here alone,
Examining each hopeful pilgrim for piety,
His posthumous honour to guard these precious bones.