Three Mules
Letter to Mastro
And the queen mounted on the wonderful mule
called Margarita that belonged to her husband king Peter
and sat on the mule as women do and asked her squire
whose name was Poutzourello to bring along her spurs
and told him that when she makes a sign to him he’d help her
turn and sit like a man…
- CHRONICLE OF MACHAIRAS
In Damascus during one night of vigil
I thought I saw the ghost of Oum Haram pass by
the venerable woman of the Prophet’s lineage.
I heard the noise of hooves like silver dinars
as though she was climbing hills of salt
toward Larcaca, riding her mule.
I waited there among the fresh branches
biting on the fruit of the myrtle bush;
my eyes were stung by a whiteness
perhaps the salt perhaps her ghost. And then
a whisper in the bushes: ‘It was here
that my mule slipped. This stone
hit crashed on my diaphanous neck
and I released my victorious soul.
I was full of the will of god;
a mule can’t bear such a weight;
don’t forget this and don’t do injustice to the mule.’
She said and vanished. Nevertheless even now
her mule still grazes in my mind,
as well as the other one whose heart stopped
when they freed her of the two coffins,
of the two unjustly killed brothers
by the hangman there in Koutsoventi.
But the most famous of them all how can I call her? In
the place where, those who lived lower than the castles
were forgotten like the soil of another year,
she still sails free in the wings of fame;
the famous beast of queen Eleanora.
The golden spurs on her belly,
on her saddle the unquenched loins,
at her trotting those bouncing breasts
filled with death like pomegranates.
And when Neapolitans Genovese and Lombards
brought to a royal table
on a silver platter, all bloodied the shirt of the killed king
and did away with the wretched brother John;
I imagine that she must have neighed that night,
beyond the apathy of her race,
as the dog howls,
in double trappings, in her gold rumps, in the stable
the mule Margarita.
Libros Libertad 