Friendly, yes. Very friendly.
Their doors are always open. But they talk a lot —
they are more—how do you say—more raw.
I’m listening to my new guide. She’s from Oslo
but everything is strange to her — outlandish people,
a word for tribes over the border, gypsies lighting fires;
the Romans believed they were banished from Egypt
for refusing to help the Virgin;
another story goes — they were banished
because they helped the Virgin and child.
Whatever the truth, they wandered like vikings.
After England had fallen,
half the tribe seemed to end up in Constantinople.
Most of them were miserable,
but Cnut was happy in the big walled farm,
Micklegarth he called it.
When Magnus Barford came to visit,
the Dane refused to take up arms.
He’d had enough of broken skulls.
If you could see the cabbages
I’ve planted with my own hands,
you’d understand.
But Magnus was a different sort of man.
He told his boys that Fortune isn’t a train
that arrives everyday at the same time.
She’s a prostitute who offers herself briefly
before passing on to another.
Magnus was bitterly opposed
to the womanly cabbage planting ways of Cnut the Dane —
unfortunate anagram for a traitor.
Now I need my ears as much as my eyes
to see the mountains that are rising around me,
phallic, ego monuments.
From the mudlands of Holland
to the source of the Rhine,
from the Porte of the Vizier,
all the way back to Lofoten
by way of the Volga and the Don.
This is the water cycle of Europe.
After the vizier became a tooth-pick holder,
his cousin went into hiding;
he found himself in the hills over the Drina
where he shot a wolf to bring back to the Porte,
an offering for the new man.
It’s the last one, he lied.
How much do you want for it?
A bag of bullets.
For what you’ve killed with a single bullet, you must be mad.
The Slav took the bright, dead face from the hands of the vizier.
He knew a man like that couldn’t refuse
such a symbol of violence….
Wait!
That’s how he got what he wanted.
That’s how he returned to the Balkans
ready for the next war.
Laurence O’Dwyer | The Washing Machine
Contents | Mudlark No. 75 (2023)