Oh, Tashmetu-sharrat, love of my life,
Look at how we built up Nineveh:
How high its walls now stand, astonishing
All who know its great antiquity,
An entrepot, these past six thousand years.
By ‘we’ I mean myself as royalty.
My father, Sargon, and the conqueror
Tiglath-Pileser, third of that great name,
My grandfather and a mighty king,
Built not Nineveh, nor ruled from its precincts.
This has been my vision for the state.
But Tashmetu-sharrat, for whom I build,
The fineness of whose features surely is
The work of Belet-ili, Mistress of
The gods, the Queen of Heaven, you in truth,
More beautiful than any other woman,
Have moved my soul to this surpassing labour,
Harnessing the treasures of an empire,
Surpassing even Babylon in glory:
The crown of centuries, the seat of power.
Yet that is but the merest carapace,
The shell, the outer rim, of what I’ve built,
For you, the living consort of my realm:
The Hanging Gardens and Unrivalled Palace,
Mirroring the act of genesis.
The vast enclosure, splendid in conception,
By virtue of its scale and elevation,
Its winged-bull colossi and its sphinxes,
Its scented timber doors, breathtaking murals,
But most of all its vast and watered arbours,
Are all for you, while others merely marvel.
The winged-bulls and sphinxes symbolize
Those aeons past, before the human epoch,
Which we, now, in Assyria, transcend.
We, exotic Queen of all I rule.
That’s, of course, Romantic metaphor.
The Nineveh of my imagining’s
Composed of all we’ve breathed to one another,
And my Unrivalled Palace, graced with Gardens,
Is the Book of Love I wrote for you.
Its scale and symmetry, its illustrations,
The villanelle at its erotic heart,
The temple poems binding its discursions,
The empire of its manifold allusions,
Transcend the ruins of Sennacherib.
For who can live within his Hanging Gardens,
Or on the lofty terraces he built,
Which Medes and Babylonians destroyed
As wantonly as he’d sacked Babylon –
Whereas my verse for you will live for aye.