Until You'Re Not, My Love Poem by gershon hepner

UNTIL YOU’RE NOT, MY LOVE



“I’ve come home, ” the wandering princess said;
“To be forever yours is now my lot.”
The Ruler, skeptic, whispered when in bed:
“Until you’re not, my love, until you’re not.”

Joyce Carol Oates reviews Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (“In the Emperor’s Dream House, ” NYR, June 12,2008) :

By the novel’s end the “barren Mughal princess has been absorbed into the Emperor Akhbar’s khayal, “his godlike omnipotent fancy, ” having taken the place of his fantasy-queen Jodha. Even the most extraordinary female in the history of mankind is finally just a man’s fancy, as Qara Köz has become the author’s:

“I have come home after all, ” she told [Akhbar]. “You have allowed me to return, and here I am, at my journey’s end. And now, Shelter of the World, I am yours.”
Until you’re not, the Universal Ruler thought. My love, until you’re not.How wonderfully ironic, and appropriate, that in the final lines of Rushdie’s ingeniously constructed postmodern “romance” the fevered sex-spellis finally broken: male omnipotence out-trumps the most powerful female sorcery, eventually.

6/20/08