A Caliph of Cordoba, by Norbert Hirschhorn

Abd-ar-Rahman III Proclaims the Caliphate of Cordoba, artist not known (European School) 19th century

A Caliph of Cordoba

possessed the largest, bluest diamond known, then or since, nested on an embroidered silk pillow in an ermine-clad cedarwood box inlaid with sapphires & gold, in a triple-locked alabaster room.  Once a year, on the day of his accession, he, he alone, entered the room to gaze, fondle, & kiss the stone. One year, to his horror, he saw a gash, a long, deep, ramate gouge. Some demon, some djinn… His viziers, courtiers, sorcerers, artisans could only cluck, hold tightly to their parts as the Caliph raged & wept, wept & raged, until an itinerant peddler, selling beads, glass & paste, arrived in the city, soon to learn the cause of the crazed wails coming from the palace. He offered his service. The Caliph, desperate, shut the peddler for three days in the alabaster room: Succeed or die! When the peddler emerged, he had, with his own small, flawed, white diamond, incised a nascent rose on the stone, the gash now the stem, the other scratches, the thorns. 
  
Norbert Hirschhorn

This poem was also based on a parable told by Jacob ben Wolf Kranz, the Dubner Maggid (d. 1804).

Norbert Hirschhorn is a public health physician, commended by President Bill Clinton as an “American Health Hero,” proud to follow in the tradition of physician-poets. Hirschhorn has published seven previous collections, recently a bilingual Arabic-English co-translation with Syrian physician-poet Fouad M. Fouad, Once Upon a Time in Aleppo, Hippocrates Press, London, 2020. His latest collection, Over the Edge, was published in 2023, by Holland Park Press, London. A new collection of prose poems is in development.