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Closed Eyelids, Closed Wings |
(After "Sketches")
... I prefer to talk to the dead:
The living have given up their
Listening. Those gone before
Share my whisperings.
Quirk's illusion. Tears
Brined on hot stones.
And when I step out - ex-officio,
I am never segregated, alone.
I carry the bold genesis
Of the bronze age -
Iliad threads caught in
A coat of Homeric undertones...
"Wherever I travel Greece wounds me!"
That enamel cry, Seferis. I know
The Aegean once flowered
With corpses and your Centaur's
Plight met rabid dogs. Perhaps
It turned sailors into poets. But mute
Rests the exotic post-exorcism my
Reformer of Odyssey. This;
A wayfaring visitor gathers
The proclamations
Your saddened harvest held
Within the breast of the night's sun.
Ever dark; the cold glistening chains!
Ever dark epistles defying
Still darker ransoms - the erosion
Of power and hands nailed
Blue-black to the gunwale. Now
The tongue's attack...
"We are dying! Our Gods are dying..."
Not so. One crippled monk
Tends the door-key to St Mama's.
Starfish scuttle a pilgrimage from
Corfu, to Crete, to the new
Renaissance
Weight-bridge... Athens... while
Nearby a saffron rose makes peace
With the half moon and pine
And juniper are upstanding.
I raise the small terracotta statue
To the heavens' might...
Aphrodite's lips
Bloom scripted continuance...
copyright 2016
Stefanie
Bennett |
