The Poet and the Four Brides of Syria


Under a towering arcade of the grand souq in the country’s capital, the center of all things, a poet leaned against a shop’s doorway when the four brides walked by dressed in white, married to Peace, having put away the black abayas for the sake of their new Spouse, and held the blood banner with white lettering imploring all to cease violence, then stood in silence. Someone took a shaky video.  A few moments of quiet, and one bride began that trilling ululation the Mediterranean has heard from its women since the ancients, that rapid high-pitched lee-lee-lee-lee-lee-lee, over and over again,  the gathering crowd joined in like a flash mob, until the store windows, the street itself, vibrated with the sound heard at wedding celebrations, and so the bands of radiance expanded outward until security forces came to take them away, and the poet stepped back into the shadow of the doorway with his pocket notebook and his pencil stub to write, “from this, daily at high noon, from the dome of the Great Mosque of Damascus, four white doves of Memory will fly forever upward.”