Interpol 22019-1.7: The Head of the Hatra Apollo

No light can gild the sun god’s cheek but strains

through burlap now, Phoibos the refugee,

his head a marble cabbage in a sack

jouncing east by pickup down a dirt track

across Seleucid wastes, Parthian plains,

once more fortune’s tourist, bobbing free.

Or not—just stashed behind a rubbish mound

where bare-boned goats might crop a scraggy meal,

scant miles from the museum’s shattered room.

Stripped of laurels, his oracles, his loom

of sacred strings, no Horai here spin round,

just pacing men who wait to close the deal.

A goatherd sings, slings a Kalashnikov:

the godhead mute since looters hacked it off.