Elizabeth Hoover

Bloomington, IN

An Ostentation of Peacocks

“How many times have you come hither with pilgrims

and barbarians to drive us hence? It is not want of

possessions but only ambition of the mind that drives

you.”—Osbern of Bawdsley’s account of the 1147 siege of

Lisbon

The Guidebook promised peacocks, so there we were

as ragged females screeched on the ramparts and the lone

male dragged his tail down the slope towards

the Mouraria, where we were instructed not to go,

our guide cautioning us that we would get lost in the alleys

like crusaders caught in the district’s maze and trying to outrun

the swing of the Castello’s gates. They were saved by that

nimble martyr Martim Moniz, who flung his body between

the iron doors. The ball of his femur cracked in its hinge,

but would not give allowing the soldiers to rush over his body

and slaughter Tunisians, Spanish, Portuguese alike.

They sliced the Bishop to his neckbone and flayed

the African prefect, stretched his black skin into a banner

flapping over the cowed city. They relegated the Arabs

to the Mouraria, buildings scattered like pebbles on the slope.

The dead were burned on the ramparts, a blazing halo

reminding those below to hush and be grateful.

Fifty years later, British passing through on their way

home from the Holy Land were baffled by dark-skinned men

trading in the streets and they sacked the city again—

overturning baskets of bright azulejoes, cages of magpies

with gold collars—and left with cartloads of hand-woven

prayer rugs, necklaces of ears with clasps made from tongues,

silver tureens of sugar, and children chained together on foot.

In the dim light, we can barely make out what the guidebook

tells us about these stones, their striations of conquest,

masons fleeing left ribs of unfinished arches that now lean

into the draining sky. Instead we coax the skittish birds

With pão—bread in this language of layered Greek,

Latin, Phoenician, and Arabic like a cracked hinge—

but they will not come. They claw over the loose cobbles

scattering pebbles toward the river, now gold in the light.

In the darkening, I catch the blue flash of the peacock’s tail

now at the edge of the slums where an Arab boy hocks

soccer jerseys until the polícia’s green light sweeps, and he turns

disappearing into the Mouraria’s net of narrow streets.