(Four Seasons production: uses iconic images and footage of the city of contemporary Washington D.C as intertexts.)

Read poem here and reflect on the following focus questions.

• Compare the clip’s image of Capitol Hill (above left) with Australian photographer Frank Hurley’s photo of the ‘Mosque of Omar’ in Jerusalem on right (source). In what other ways does the text link Arab and contemporary U.S. culture? What meanings do the links create?
  
  
• How do the sound effects of the sirens and helicopters affect your response to the poem? What meanings do those sounds convey? How does this comply with or subvert the meaning of the poem? What other features of the soundtrack affect your response, and how?
  

• How does the multimodal text invite you to understand the reference to ‘Saba’ - literally or symbolically? Justify your response.
  
  
  
• Consider the juxtaposition of the image of the iconic statue of Abraham Lincoln and the lines:

The city of Saba cannot be understood
 from within itself…
Turn toward teachers and prophets
who don’t live in Saba.

Does this juxtaposition work to support or subvert the meaning of the multimodal text? How does the angle of view of Lincoln in the still from the text (right) comply with or subvert the meanings of these lines in the original text?

• What is the effect of the counterpoint between the applause (and end of the applause) from the members of Congress and the exhortation in the following lines?

…sit quietly, and listen for a voice within that will say,
Be more silent.

• How do the multimodal elements and contemporary context illuminate Rumi’s original poem?