Persian Feminist

Another poem in my series of people pursuing professions other than what made them famous.

Persian Feminist

             after Carl Tomlinson 

If Scheherazade were a seamstress

she would have enchanted a magic

carpet for a misogynistic monarch

with threads of gossamer, adorning it

with traces of thieves skimming gold,

sailors shipwrecked on foreign shores,

a young lad with his lamp-living genie,

and fabricating tableaus suffused

with swashbucklers clashing against

marauders, completing her task

with feminine subtlety under the aegis

of candlelight in a thousand and one nights.

Marilyn Aschoff Mellor