Your education came too early, before you had seen an alcazaba

Before you learned about the journey of pomegranates.

You didn’t know how to create paradise in a white city

Or the sudden turns these strongholds would have to make

Not to admit your enemies into a garden of oranges

Where the women sit, not quite prisoners,

Gazing through lattices at the bareheaded hills of Spain.
You didn’t understand the way God moved through history

Northward with the hacking sword

Revealed through a tribal touch for flowers.

You couldn’t allow exactitude and softness to make love

And birth a Caliphate, azure and unflinching

Arches holding up the heart like an eternal Córdoba.

You knew nothing of the interior architecture of your own first name.
          In the dark night you smuggled your selves

          Out of Tehran, legally or illegally.

          Black crows strode down the streets in pairs

          Tented, your own small gender, with mystery under the skirt.

          On the plane you tugged at your mother’s headscarf:

          You don’t need to wear that anymore.

          You carry the girlchild’s instinct, you spit in the face of the caul.
Then you found Andalusia and through the hand glimpsed

The divine romance worn by wind and the human palimpsest,

The taste man has for vanquishing himself.

Under the lights of another Roman theatre, lit below the fort

Loyalty grew in mathematics, worship in the stone.

What was past carved itself a resting-place where you could briefly see

Further than a veil, into Revelation, exhaling with the fall.