something i scribbled in cairo

[so_lily_briscoe]

Dust, smoke, delusional cityscapes in the self-styled Mother of the World.
          A blankness of impressions, or
          an oversaturation.
A chaos of artifacts or of helter-skelter modernity,
    beauty rapidly eroding under dust storms, pollutants,
  corrupt autocracy.

This urgency of making a record -- but record of what?
    What does it mean, to take in
       ancient pyramids, the medieval citadel,
    while sipping a cappuccino on the roof of the Nile Hilton?

The shadow-spectacle: gold-and-rose-lit sailboats
          skimming on a once divinely wild river now
       disciplined by concrete banks, highrise apartment blocks,
    floating night clubs. A greatness lingering in the
       historical horizons --

but what power might lie dormant here, in
                   this congested modern chaos?

And what good does it do, whom does it
                   serve,
                         to remember?

Human history of a sort entirely in contradiction
       to our vague, intangible western memories.
    Elizabeth's bones moulder in Westminster -- it
             was not her bones that reigned. The extraordinary
             Queen consigned to symbolic significance, to
                our hypersignified history.
But here is Amenhotep's hair, his fingernails, his
        flesh. Here, preserved for 3500 years by a culture
    whose great hope was a future fleshly awakening,
    lies the body that remains, in some sense, the
  man who once ruled the world.