Map on gazelle skin dated 1513 CE by Turkish navigator Piri Reis
West is not a direction
It’s a
limo on a
dirty Bombay street
an architecture masters
from the university of Madrid
hanging on a wall in Tehran
it’s a pizza on a plate in Cairo
an iPhone in a hand in São Paolo
a book by Sartre on a shelf in Phuket
a magician on a talent show
being watched on YouTube in Pakistan
It’s a breeze block in the wall of a house in Nairobi
an engineered seed in a sack in the Congo
a factory for dish scrubbers in China
a boat stuffed with young women sewing shirts
a van with a Moroccan man clinging underneath
a Khoi-San bushman longing for his homeland
from a high-rise in Johannesburg
a black woman in Nigeria bleaching her skin
burning her scalp to make her hair straight
It’s a million bake sales and sponsored skydives
Afghan orphans adopted by never-seen donors
a sign saying ‘Don’t be Silly’ at an anti-fascism rally
vans full of mens’ running shoes being driven to Calais
curses muttered at the £9m concrete wall they pass
It’s a 19-year-old activist being crushed under a tank in Tel Aviv
A London boy barefoot in the Amazon seeking
Wisdom from painted shamans
The tents we designed for refugees fleeing
Missiles we made and sold
It’s a ninety-year old English man who dies of cold in winter
because he can’t afford the heating bills
It’s a Spanish woman in a red dressing gown
And shiny peach lipstick wearing dirty crocs
walking her dog
It’s a young woman fighting to be free of a husband
who tells her “You’ll starve to death without me”
It’s an ice floe in Norway creaking downhill unseen
An Ann Summers party among suburban housewives
and a nun on a Soho street ladling out soup
It’s a pool of mercury on whose silver palm
The sky is distortedly clear
Whose glistening promises burn with their cold
If you ever get close enough to touch it
And it sends drops of itself scattering
Trying to reach the bamboo forests
And the warm red soil
And the forgiving ocean
To forget their nature and reflect
Some truer texture
But we are always an emulsion
We don’t dissolve
West is hope
And vanity
And frustrated ambition
You might drown trying to reach it
or get dizzy trying to avoid it
because it’s east and south and north
It’s in a private school in Rabat
while the spirituality you seek is back home
in a quiet town in Europe
where there is enough abundance to let go of it
enough gloss to want freedom from it
There is Dunya wherever you go
Turn the atlas inside out
