BRANDON MARLON - POEMS

Brandon Marlon is a writer from Ottawa, Canada. He received his B.A. in Drama & English from the University of Toronto and his M.A. in English from the University of Victoria. His poetry was awarded the Harry Hoyt Lacey Prize in Poetry (Fall 2015), and his writing has been published in 250+ publications in 28 countries. www.brandonmarlon.com.

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The Emperor's Pilgrimage
​

​Beholding the splendorous imperial caravan--
sixty thousand souls including twelve thousand slaves,
eighty camels each laden with three hundred pounds of gold--
wending its way across the Sahara and beyond,
from Timbuktu to Cairo to Mecca,
sixty-five hundred miles over two years,
would have doubtless beggared belief.
 
Fathom for a moment what it might have felt like
being Musa himself, newly minted mansa of a Mali Empire
enlivened by veins of salt and gold, its wasteland oases
southern termini of trans-Saharan trade routes;
imagine the moxie necessary to undertake
such an unprecedented cross-continental venture,
risking all to fulfill a credendum,  
dragging an entire retinue into parts afar,
trusting docents not to mislead
and micturating dromedaries not to dehydrate,
securing safe passage by lavishing gifts on locals,
braving desert sandstorms and Arab-Berber bandits
intent on razzias abrupt and readily executed
owing to the convoy's andante tempo.
 
How wondrous to have camped in the shadow
of Giza's pyramids on Cairo's outskirts;
how terrific a relief to have been lent
the Mamluk sultan's summer palace for a season;
how gratifying, at long last, to have laid eyes on
and circled the Ka'aba, housing the meteoric baetyl,
a milestone that brought titled men to tears.
 
Surely the prayers of a ruler who ordered prayer houses
built wherever his caravan halted on Fridays were answered;
that he went on to establish or endow mosques,
madrasas, libraries, schools, and palaces throughout
his domain is evidence enough, and what irony
that the same figure magnetized by elsewheres
refashioned his capital into a famed center of learning,
attracting scholars and students for centuries.
 
 

Noble Warrior
​

​Ensconced in Damascus, he was widely revered
as a Sufi and Islamic scholar from Mascara, Algeria,
a hajji whose pilgrimage as a young man made him
desirous of living the life religious, a gallant stalwart
once elected emir when his countrymen in Oran
had declared jihad against French invaders; still,
his fifteen years as guerilla leader were long gone,
and exile to Syria had proved a serene sentence.
 
Imagine his countenance, then, when rioting Muslims
threatened to massacre local Maronite Christians,
forcing him to gallop with his posse amid mayhem,
rescuing nuns, priests, merchants, entire families,
plucking Western consuls like brands from a blaze,
safeguarding civilians in the city's medieval citadel,
and the surplus from that palace in his very own home.
 
How biblically reminiscent was the obstreperous mob
arriving at his door demanding he surrender his guests!
Yet Abd al-Qadir, more seasoned in resistance,
outdid Lot and the Levite both, rebuking the bloodthirsty
for wishing to slay innocents contradictory
to Allah's will, thereby dispersing miscreants.
 
Ten thousand lives he spared from slaughter, for which
chivalry he garnered renown as a second Saladin
and was showered with honors, his ethics sung
from the Vatican to Greece to Turkey;
America and Britain bestowed bejeweled firearms;
even his victorious conqueror, France, could not resist
awarding the Legion of Honor and an annual pension.
Thus a resistance fighter turned irresistible,         
his principles crowned with universal laurels.
 
 

Sorrowing World
​

​Zealous to consummate credal demands,
the wolves of evening sod in blood a globe
of suspecting yet effete civilians,
torpid fodder awaiting their fate,
unsure of their means, wavering in their resolve.
 
Apologists sated with a surfeit of massacres
turn reticent and no longer default to excuses,
refraining from the quondam claim
that our murderers are depraved because deprived,
merely seeking redress for valid grievances.
 
The whirlwind's reapers sowed no wind;
innocents slain were unstained to the end
that met them abruptly on a whim,
at the pleasure of hellions who connive
to unnerve, terrify, slaughter.
 
We have become benumbed and inured to the scourge,
idle bystanders to our own piecemeal demise,
resigned to a grim regimen convulsing the civilized
with wretched regularity, impoverished by loss
while still at a loss as to how to stanch the hemorrhage.
 
Though we weary of chilling eyewitness accounts,
horror's array will unrelentingly hold sway
until budding homicides discern
that none are ever sanitized by bloodbaths,
not even those ideologically inspired.
 
 
 

Ar-Raqqa
​

The fighting is heavy, intense, chaotic,
territory at times swapped like liras; yelling for Allah,
die-hard holdouts holed up in hideouts
delay the inevitable with suicide bombers
advancing on coalition soldiers as mujahideen
retreat into hidden tunnel networks
or disguise themselves as noncombatants
to catch kafirs off guard.
 
Exurbs, suburbs, districts, and neighborhoods
fall after overnight airstrikes and fierce clashes
by day, desperate fanatics offering stiff resistance
to Syrian Kurds, Arab militiamen, and US special forces
who manage to cut off all escape routes
from the occasionally caliphal capital.
 
But now the four-year caliphate is being rolled back,
rolled up, a tattered prayer mat.
 
In this final phase of pangs and throes
the order of the day is surrender or die;
only the deluded or dehydrated
fail to recognize this fateful hour
as the last stand of the damned.
 
Half the Abbasid city is rubble, its streets strewn
with civilian cadavers, madness' mute witnesses.
 
Among those internally displaced, intrinsically traumatized,
tentative selves emerge, emancipated
from oppression and burqas
involuntarily donned and rapidly doffed,
imprisonment's humid metonym.
 
Black flags topple from minarets,
though tomorrow remains uncertain,
victory's eve uncannily mundane: as ever,
night clothes the heavens with darkness...
...and the Euphrates caches her secrets.
 
 
 

Israel's Faithful
​

​Ultimately, just what are all these
millennia, invasions, conquests,
destructions, captivities, dispersions,
oppressions, subjugations, persecutions,
inquisitions, disputations, expulsions,
blood libels, denouncements, propagandas,
pogroms, genocides, and terrorisms
in the face of Israel's faithful,
for whom the Holy Temple stood
mere moments ago, whose nostrils
still intake the sweet, savory aroma
of singed frankincense and myrrh?
 
Even if a beggared God faltered as a straggler,
unable to go on, pleading to be no more,
they would unfailingly uphold Him
from generation to generation.
 
Custodians of tradition's continuum,
they define fealty for the nations and lesson
onlookers astonished at their endurance.
 
With both hands offer every bit of pity
to the implacable foes of Israel's faithful.