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CITY OF THE
DEAD
The stench of rotting things hangs over
the City of the Dead
where people sleep between the graves
and live in tombs.
Everything rots among the living and
the dead, except for plastic things
which tend to last, quite possibly,
forever.
Old food rots. Paper, fruit and flowers rot,
flesh of all sorts rots. People’s traces rot
like the rotting
things Mahfouz described.
Human faeces rot in time and space
and even their stench begins to rot
in time.
It was here, turning a corner, that I saw
the dead dog lying by a doorway
freshly dead, red with newborn blood
having had no time to start its
rotting yet
its
rabies killed at birth
by men with clubs and swords
who wiped the blood from their blades
as I watched
and wiped it from their memories.
‘Salam’alaykum,’ I said, a stranger.
‘Wa’alaykum es salam,’ they replied and wiped
away the memory.
And I am grateful that I turned the corner
when I did, and not a minute earlier
while the killing happened
when the swords
struck
and
the clubs came down
the dying dog yelping
as its lonely death began.
Here, in the City of the Dead
among gravestones and the tombs
and the people who live between them
under a mean and vengeful sun
the awful rotting of the newly dead
has, surely – the buzzing of the flies
confirms –
just
begun.
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