The buzzards circled in the blue sky

As the soldiers counted the feathers falling

Softly on their heads

And upon the ancient ramparts;

Thick as the crust of the earth;

Thicker than the ice around Satan’s waist.

One soldier carved the phrase ‘Here lies the house of God’ 

Into the castle wall with the point of his knife, 

Thinking even when he fell, the truth of the Lord would be eternal.

He failed to ask, ‘whose God?’

And, ‘what if there is none?’.

It was Constantinople, the center of the world,

The might of the ancient age tattooed upon the the earth

Eternal in Jesus, as sharp as the thorns upon His bleeding scalp.

They held their spears and pounded their chests 

With postured valiance and vacant determination

While the shadows of the buzzards ringed like dark halos above them;

As Jesus was with them with unfettered might:

His Light gleaming upon them through the holes in His hands.

And the men from the Turkish clans muttered and laughed

As they circled the city―

Claimed their God, Allah, was with them

As they toiled with the clambering clunk of cannon

And moved the hulking metal mouths which could devour hell and history

And set loose the Islamic Djinns and devils upon

The falling age of Rome.

Their age was here; the golden light from heaven; 

Faceless Mohammed kissing their brows, as they saw 

The black buzzards floating above the high ramparts

Like Jibril sending blessings upon them.

Here, the center of the world would fall to its knees

Implode in a renaming of itself in conversion for their new age.

Both the men high in their walled city

And the men sweating in the entrenched siege pits

Could taste the salt of the age, 

Could taste the permanence and the perishing of the moment

As the pillars that held them shook and stuttered 

And realigned the will of death and war and passion.

The wall fell and Jesus fled.

One warrior climbed the high, smoking wall 

And found the carved inscription:

‘Here lies the house of God’

And agreed with the news that here did lie the house of God

But its truth had only come to fruition now―and he wept for Allah…

I taste the salt too,

Do you not? From their tears upon my tongue,

As I feel the kissings of faceless Mohammaed, 

The flutters of Jibril and Allah,

The light of Jesus and the carving of his thorns.

For their age is always as dead as it was eternal,

And the fields are smoking infinite, 

Hemorrhaged with blessings,

Cacophonous with prayer,

From Byzantium to Istanbul, 

From Kyiv to Gaza,

From Khartoum to Moscow,

From you to me.