On the Painting Poem by John Mateer

Neither that album page, nor its pristine miniature painting
of a fabled Persian garden where plants bloom with human features,
nor that monochromatic landscape in Coetzee's Age of Iron
under which, as under a bloodied Oriental carpet,
there were the dead faces none of us could avoid stepping on,

this panel of the Altar of the Virgin of the Navigators in the Real Alcazar,
in the chamber from which Queen Isobel despatched the Conquistadors,
she who like the Eternal Mother harboured all behind her chador,
this statement on the Expulsion of the Moors -

Santiago on a white horse, sword raised and poised, ready to swoop;
the heads of the disembodied, their faces stony and sprouting from the ground.