Passing these whiter shades of pale, these pretty traces of lace,

We reveal the opal-luminosity of these few remaining late Romans,

Their indigo-dreams red with the gore of resistance on this bloody

May Day, negating their absorption into the timeless air of antiquity,

Through the thousand year creation of Constantinople’s drift and swell,

Rising into Elysium’s perfumed garden of lucidity.  Finally torn apart

 By Mehmed’s desecration, his infidel-hordes sweltering on their road to riches.

Muslim soldiers digging stench-filled trenches for Byzantium’s ladies;

While the few ragged monks drag the crucified from St Sophia’s walls,

Answering, unwittingly, deep- echoes of love’s sympathy for the dead,

Which, day-by-day from 1453 to 911, culminate in these Transylvanian

Transformations: under the endless summer skies of holy Constantinople,

Lengthening the penumbra-deep-shadows above those steepling twin towers,

As, after centuries of fitful forgetting, holy war resumes its darkest powers.