Returning to a Hotel in Uskudar

By Sally Zakariya

What’s different this time is the city’s voice.

Local mosques have amplified the call

to prayer, starting just a beat apart,

loudspeaker chorus tuned to heaven.

 

But in our room the same slim beds, thin-

blanketed and low, the same square

bathtub with its dauntingly high sides,

the same small window on the sea.

 

Outside, a scruffy clutch of stray

cats risk their lives in crowded

streets, slipping past the busy wheels

to claim their meager handouts.

 

A cemetery’s small community of souls

sleep under narrow headstones scribed

in flowing script and topped with carved

turbans that mark their rank in life.

 

My rank in life is tourist, yours master

of the calligraphic arts that flourish

here in Istanbul, most civilized, most

varied, most extraordinary of cities.

 

We take the ferry, Asia to Europe

across the Bosporus, across cultures,

across time, imagining Ottomans,

their vast and vanished empire.

 

On the bench across from us a Turkish

man eats rosy plums plucked from a bag

and, meditative, spits the stripped pits out

to lie with history on the Bosporus floor.

 

Sally Zakariya’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The Broadkill Review, Edge, Boston Literary Magazine, Emerge, Third Wednesday, Evening Street Review, Southern Women’s Review, and Theodate. Her poetry has won prizes from the Poetry Society of Virginia and the Virginia Writers Club. She has published two chapbooks, Insectomania (2013) and Arithmetic and other verses (2011) and volunteers as poetry editor for Richer Resources Publications, for whom she is currently editing an anthology of poems about food and eating. Zakariya lives in Arlington, Virginia, and blogs at www.butdoesitrhyme.com.