Civilisations, it’s often shouted,
clash. Particularly mine

and yours. At Thermopylae
the Persians crashed

into and squashed the Spartan
infantry. At Salamis

the Athenians sank the Persian
fleet. Romans were crushed

by Parthian horsed-archers
but they later skilfully

smashed Cleopatra and took
Egypt. Then Christianity

and the destruction
of Jerusalem’s temples. Yet

my religion untouched by your
god’s self-sacrifice

Zoroastrian, polytheist, Jewish
and Islam: your Romanised tribes

unified in the exigent cause
of the Cross. My side took Spain.

Yours defeated the Saracens
at Poitiers. Then the Crusades. Then

the Ottomans. Scimitars clashed
chainmail, cannons fired

on muskets. Then the tanks,
the air-raids and suicide bombers.

But do I forget to tell
you about the Muslim scholars

studying Aristotle? The English
poets translating the ghazals

and rubaiyats of Persians? Or my
watching sneakily the pirated

videos of Friday the 13th
and Mad Max? Or your eating

kebabs and saving to buy
an Afghan rug? Perhaps. But my

forgetting to include
the images of exchange

in the midst of the clatter
of the chronology of hostility

proves a little more than dubious
compared to the fallacy

of classification. How did I
become Eastern and you

my Other? Vice versa? How
am I grouped? According to what

mischievous logic? Am I
shrunken to an ethnic type? But I

don’t wear turban, ride camel
have never spoken Arabic or bothered

with the Koran. Your pride in
the Acropolis, Colosseum

and Westminster Abbey, frankly
nonexistent. To what cultures

do we belong? To repeat:
mine, not of sensuality

and hashish-induced lassitude, but
a love of Rimbaud

and Belgian beer. Yours, not of greed
and rationalist modernity

but baklavas and the Book
of Thoth. Why determine us

by the trite significance
of hair-colour and nose-shape? What

does it take to overcome the logic
of the Third Reich? But enough

questions. What use when The Answer
is being shouted and proliferates

above the murmur of my individual’s
doubt.