Interpol 22019-1.7: The Head of the Hatra Apollo

Missing from the National Museum, Baghdad, April 2003 No light can gild the sun god’s cheek but strains through burlap now, Phoibos the refugee, his head a marble cabbage in a sack jouncing east by pickup down a dirt track across Seleucid wastes, Parthian plains, once more fortune’s tourist, bobbing free. Or not—just stashed behind a rubbish mound where bare-boned goats might crop a scraggy meal, scant miles from the museum’s shattered room. Stripped of laurels, his oracles, his loom of sacred strings, no Horai here spin round, just pacing men who wait to close the deal. A goatherd sings, slings a Kalashnikov: the godhead mute since looters hacked it off.