Vintage
corridor of empires
Corridor of Empires
(A Levantine Chronicle)
Croesus falls —
golden Sardis quiet under Persian boots,
the western buffer broken.
From the Pactolus to the Halys,
the road bends south,
its dust already scented with cedar and myrrh.
Babylon still holds the river cities,
Judah still dreams in exile,
but the tide is turning:
Cyrus takes the gates without a battle,
and the edict rides the wind
back to Jerusalem’s stones.
The Levant listens —
a strip of earth between sea and desert,
its harbours open to Phoenician sails,
its caravan routes stitched
to the looms of Egypt and Anatolia.
Every army must pass here,
every god must learn the names of its hills.
Persia rules with satrap’s seal and royal road,
until the horsehair helmets of Macedon
spill down from the north.
Alexander drinks from its wells,
leaves Greek in the mouths of its markets,
and marches on to the Indus.
Rome comes like a tide without ebb,
paving the coast with stone,
naming its provinces,
planting its eagles in the courtyards of temples.
The corridor endures —
a prize, a tax, a prophecy.
Centuries turn:
Byzantine chant,
Arab call to prayer,
Crusader hymn,
Ottoman drum.
The Levant remains the narrow throat
through which the world swallows its own history.
And still the dust remembers
the day Croesus fell,
when the road from Sardis bent south,
and the corridor learned again
that no empire passes without leaving
its shadow in the stones.
.
