Robert Lowell, from "The Poet at Seven" (an Imitation of Rimbaud)

What he feared most
were the sticky, lost December Sundays,
when he used to stand with his hair gummed back
at a little mahogany stand, and hold
a Bible pocked with cabbage-green mould.
Each night in his alcove, he had dreams.
He despised God, the National Guard,
and the triple drum-beat
of the town crier calling up the conscripts.
He loved the swearing
workers, when they crowded back, black
in the theatrical twilight to their wards.
He felt clean
when he filled his lungs with the smell—
half hay fever, half iodine—
of the wheat,
he watched its pubic golden tassels swell
and steam in the heat,
then sink back calm.

- Robert Lowell, from Imitations

Hagia Sophia / Matthias Enard's "Compass"

"I was corresponding regularly with Sarah, postcards of the Hagia Sophia, seen from the Golden Horn. As Grillparzer said in his travel journal, 'There may be nothing like it in the whole world.' He describes, enthralled, the succession of monuments, palaces, villages, the power of this site that struck me fully too and filled me with energy, so open is this city, a wound in the sea, a gash engulfed by beauty; to stroll through Istanbul was, whatever the goal of one's expedition, a wrenching of beauty on the frontier--whether you regard Constantinople as the easternmost city in Europe or the westernmost city in Asia, as an end or a beginning, as a bridge or a border, this mixed nature is fractured by nature, and the place weighs on history as history itself weighs on humans."

- From “Compass” - Mathias Enard