Replete
  
 Replete with the Nile of my teens
 with the reproaches of Cairo's mummies 
 that in coffins of glass are encaged
 for public gaze,
 with Ra,
 with Pharaohs' deities,
 with St. Catherine's wheel,
 with St. Anthony's monasteries,
 with Alexandria's Ptolemaic histories,
 with the secret power of Giza's pyramids
 which made me ponder for days:
 Should I opt for Egyptology
 for my postgraduate studies?
 But who would sponsor a female without means
 to decode hieroglyphic mysteries?
  
 Replete with the Mediterranean of my genes,
 with its redolent breeze,
 with Atargatis
 and her sacred fishes,
 with Phoenician galleys
 with Chevaliers.
 Should I opt for a medieval treatise?
 But who would allow me access to entombed realities?
 I'd better stick to rhetoric spheres,
 lest my perspicacity be burnt at the stake
 on Friday the thirteenth.
 
 Retreat
  
 They speak of my retreat psychoanalytically
 as a regrettable condition to be confiscated
 for I have persistently abstained
 from partaking of the secret knowledge
 of these self-ordained, fashionable dames
 who voice their oracles in street-cafes
 in the glow of charcoal and hookahs' haze:
  
 Sarsara's vermillion, plumped-up lips
 do not at all match her hips.
 The augmented mounds of Rita's breasts
 are not as pointed as Giza's Pyramids.
 Mrs. Kaffani's sculpted cheeks
 will be bereft of kisses on peaks.
 Their husbands' antlers exceed the height
 of the Eiffel Tower by a terrestrial mile….”
 
 I had opted for silence Far From the Madding Crowd.
 My horse gallops along Ivanhoe's from sunset to sunrise.
 Like a monastic gnostic, I am in pursuit of light,
 an academic anchorite.
    

Susie Gharib is a graduate of the University of Strathclyde with aPh.D. on the work of D.H. Lawrence. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in multiple venues including Adelaide Literary Magazine, TheCurlew, The Ink Pantry, A New Ulster, Down in the Dirt, the PLJ, andMad Swirl.