your mother
was a girl with ashes in her eyes and gold in her nostrils
a chain delicate as autumn leading from ear to the centre
of her heart, of the place where our priest's holy incense found its sole purpose.

I just assumed that she
was a wild wanton that ran through the ashes and dust of the
streets of the market at dust, and she loved and did not love
and not loving made it easier to lay on the tabernacle of a sacred courtesan.

we don't have those anymore
they drove them out screaming, naked, heads shaven
as barren and scorched as the desert in their dying breaths
and Maryam, we don't have those anymore,
the word is not courtesan but *****.

but I took it on faith out of love for you
when you told me with fire in your eyes that your mother
saw the face of God in between the sheets of paper
as a maiden pure, the Egyptian lotus in her secret sweetness only God knew,
Psyche drawing back the veil of Isis, looking at the face of her star-birthing lover.

to love you was to look at the sun
and be burned, enflamed, seared into agony and nothingness
and yet to be clothed in the flesh of the sun anew
and when I wore nothing but the star-strewn gold dusk of my skin
I wore the sacred mantle of a courtesan.