Marco Polo on Hormuz

 Towards the end of his vivid accounts of his travels, Marco Polo does what Lyse Doucet does so well and reports on a conflict. The malik of Kalhat 'had a powerful hold over' the sultan of Kerman due to his control over Hormuz and,

commands the gulf and the sea even more effectively. 

If only Donald Trump had read Marco Polo before getting himself embroiled out of his depth.

 

The Travels are full of good stories, whether they're right or wrong. It's very much the sort of thing that can bring me a poem and I've been in search of such a thimng for quite some time. A Million Lies, a couple of weeks ago, isn't really it but Witness is a better effort. It was to be in ten syllable lines and two eight-line stanzas but attemps at form like that can be discarded. Some rhythm can be maintained without them, having used it as a framework to begin with. It could be revised further yet but, grateful for it as I am, it might be allowed to stand as it is.

Witness 

this region is so far north that the Pole Star
is left behind towards the south.
                           Marco Polo, Travels

Except there is no such topography
in which anything is further north than north.
No wonder some weren’t having it
about him seeing unicorns
but not quite as advertised,
ugly brutes wallowing in slime.
Well, yes, that was preposterous
but not for one
who’d not previously come across
such a thing as a rhinoceros. He believed his eyes.

Hyperbole is all that one has left
when one can’t see a limit to such wealth
and strangeness so that it looks infinite
like the universe still does and might be yet.
He didn’t tell the half of it, he said,
recalcitrant and not giving an inch,
for we see what we think we see. It’s true
as far as we know and not for them to say.