The morning sulks with impending rain,
held off for a moment when the sun bursts through—
star-shell of anxious illumination.
Here is that line of French infantry, their bayonets
the bristles of unshaved chins, their eyes drawn,
but of course, to your breasts,
which they admire or curse or consider
as merely another target in a world so at war yet
oblivious to its most lethal motivations.
The post on which you’re tied stands alone at the center of a lawn
sloping into a realm of spirits, where the ghosts of all
the officers you entertained—French, Belgian, German—
sip cold drinks and draw lines across blood-stained maps.
You were less spy, I think, than an accomplished liar,
pretending to be Indonesian and thus exotic to a western public
already sated—even jaded—with the plundered wealth of Asia.
So where was it you learned the Dance of the Seven Veils?
How was it you acquired such a sheen of mystic credibility?
Like a defanged cobra, measuring the world outside its basket
but writhing to the rhythms of some cross-legged piper,
you were the seemingly dangerous woman caught
in your own pretensions, your cover story undone,
your life the cipher no intelligence service could decrypt.
You decline the blindfold, staring at your executioners as if gazing
into your own abbreviated life—the defiant dance of the single woman,
the half-breed adrift in a world flush with eugenics.
Do you also decline the final cigarette?
Difficult to imagine that you would,
you who boasted of your time in the opium dens of Mumbai,
the secret annex of the Sultan’s harem.
Instead, your eyes glow with the intensity of a woman
determined to defy her past while scorning those men
too weak to stop the carnage, too dense to see
the dancer behind the veil.
Fred Pelka has written three books on disability history, the most recent being What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), and one book of poetry, A Different Blaze (Hedgerow Books, 2014). His most recent poetry has appeared in various journals.