To the city

 by Rowan Williams

To the City

1. Bosphorus

Once there were chains between the towers

shackling the green-black forest walls across the water

locked in each other's mirror-gaze, chains to choke off

the galleys headed greedily for the tense city. Not now:

this is a motorway shining with oil, the lanes

jostling and humming with their relaxed freight,

birthdays and anniversaries and conference excursions

bouncing and rocking along the cleft so confidently

you could forget the swimmers dead in the green-black

depths, the ones who failed to breach the walls

on the far shore or break the mirror. And the day trips

swing round and land where they began. But in the unquiet

morning dazzle, the dolphins arch and plunge, unannounced,

bright needles pulling threads between air

and sea. They stitch their trails round the lethal cruisers,

the crates of oil and spinning blades, come without call

or cause, go without mercy. Out of the green-black vaults

the thread leaps, wavering in unquiet light,

to tow the boats out of their channels, craw

short to shore, face to face, swimmers to gulls and sailors.

2. Ayia Sofia

And that, the Greeks tell you, is the Conqueror's black handprint,

when he rode in over the ten-foot depth

of corpses; when he leaned over, pushing

the half-globe on its axis, swinging the arrow

towards a new, south-eastern pole. The bars of light

lie angled silently, rolling against the tilted bell:

a tongue's thread cut. The foliage of immense

words painted curling and waving, unmown

green verges of a scoured field, drifts across open mouths

and scratched eyes, the layered dead

under the flaring frozen seraphs. There are no hours

to strike, no consecrating whisper to be marked, where death

so rolls and stacks its fields. Handprints of soot

inside the burnt domes of skulls; the empty segment

on the sundial, where worlds have pulled apart

and shadows stand unmoved, the clock's hands

are nailed still, the bell cracks open to a sky

of frozen stars pointed in accusation,

flaring on spikes, burning for the uncountable names

harvested by conquerors for this or that revelation's sake.

3. Phanar; the Patriarch's Cantor

Anastas. Leaning back, lifting elbows, braced,

jaw out, he curls fingers and lips, to make

his brassy diaphragm a bowl where the round gale

swings on itself, brushed the metal to a shine. Fingers

unfold into the quieter pulsing of a sandy breeze;

the drone shifts with a grind, brows are wiped,

a tired eight-year-old begins to cry, is hugged,

scolded, bundled behind the screen. The wind

starts rising once again, the couriers pick up speed

and ride into the gaping caves, the lifting wind

scrapes sandy flanks against the bowl of lung, sinus,

damp and bone. What does it carry, the straining

weight searing his arms against the stall's wood?

The creak of stones shifting on the hill; forests falling; a body,

massive, limp, released from its ropes around the mast,

struck dumb? The windy grains ringing half-audibly,

bouncing around the bowl's rim? He lifts

his palms again; welcomes the rising, the stone,

the grain, the body, the little pestle

drawn round the bronze. Anastas. Lifted. 

From Rowan Williams, The Other Mountain, 2014.