The Sultan was content to go on
just as he had always done.
Sherezade lulled him with her song.
Wooed him return to lost imagination
from what been just bed & death,
blood spilt for wealth's emptiness.
She repaid the virgin blood he'd shed,
who'd come as a slave to his bed
to lay hold of & then off with her head,
with a world imagined from her dead.
She had children by the Sultan
& lived ever after in the illusion
a thousand & one nights can bring
an embroidered fiction, as a dawn,
once upon a time in Syria...
Gift of Tongues