Constantine Palaeologos

                                             

                     by Odysseas Elytis

                                 

           DEATH AND RESURRECTION
           OF CONSTANTINE PALAIOLOGOS

           

I

As he stood there erect before the Gate

and impregnable in his sorrow

Far from the world where his spirit sought

to bring Paradise to his measure

And harder even than stone

for no one had ever looked

on him tenderly - at times his crooked teeth

whitened strangely

And as he passed by with his gaze a little

beyond mankind and from them all

extracted One who smiled on him

The Real one

Whom death could never seize

He took care to pronounce the word

sea clearly that all the dolphins

within it might shine

And the desolation so great it might

contain all of God

and every waterdrop ascending steadfastly toward

the sun

As a young man he had seen gold glittering

and gleaming on the shoulders of the great

And one night

he remembers

during a great storm the neck of the sea

roared so it turned murky

but he would not submit to it

The world's an oppressive place to live through

yet with a little pride it's worth it.

II

Dear God what now

Who had to battle with thousands

and not only his loneliness

Who?

He who knew with a single word

how to slake the thirst of entire worlds

What?

From whom they had taken everything

And his sandals with their criss-crossed

straps and his pointed trident

and the wall he mounted every afternoon like

an unruly and pitching boat

to hold the reigns against the weather

And a handful of vervain

which he had rubbed on a girl's cheek

at midnight

to kiss her

(how the waters of the moon gurled

on the stone steps three cliff-lengths

above the sea...)

Noon out of night

And not one person by his side

Only his faithful words that mingled

all their colors to leave in his hand

a lance of white light

And opposite

along the whole wall's length

a host of heads poured in plaster

as far as his eyes could see

"Noon out of night - all life a radiance!"

he shouted and rushed into the horde

dragging behind him an endless golden line

And at once he felt

the final pallor

overmastering him

as it hastened from afar.

III

Now

as the sun's wheel turned more and more swiftly

the courtyards plunged into winter and once

again emerged red from the geranium

And the small cool domes

like blue medusae

reached each time higher to the silverwork

the wind so delicately worked as a painting

for other times more distant

Virgin maidens

their breasts glowing a summer dawn

brought him branches of fresh palm leaves

and those of the myrtle uprooted

from the depths of the sea

Dripping iodine

While under his feet he heard

the prows of black ships

sucked into the great whirlpool

the ancient and smoked seacraft

from which still erect with riveted gaze

the Mothers of God stood rebuking

Horses overturned on dumpheaps

a rabble of buildings large and small

debris and dust flaming in the air

And there lying prone

always with an unbroken word

between his teeth

Himself

the last of the Hellenes!

That sail which leans on light

                    by Derek Walcott

SEA GRAPES

That sail which leans on light,

tired of islands,

a schooner beating up the Caribbean

for home, could be Odysseus,

home-bound on the Aegean;

that father and husband's

longing, under gnarled sour grapes, is

like the adulterer hearing Nausicaa's name

in every gull's outcry.

This brings nobody peace. The ancient war

between obsession and responsibility

will never finish and has been the same

for the sea-wanderer or the one on shore

now wriggling on his sandals to walk home,

since Troy sighed its last flame,

and the blind giant's boulder heaved the trough

from whose groundswell the great hexameters come

to the conclusions of exhausted surf.

The classics can console. But not enough.

                "Sea Grapes" from Selected Poems by Derek Walcott. (2007)

The Lyre of Achilles

                          

                   Excerpt from Giovanni Pascoli's

LA CETRA D'ACHILLE/THE LYRE OF ACHILLES

Then Achilles stopped to listen to the sighing

of his horses, and in the distance, the lament

of the Neriads, and through their sobs

he heard sadder, more subdued

the voice of his cerulean mother.

And then above the deep noise of the battlefield

he heard the clear notes of a lyre plucked by a singer;

while the horses sighed, shaking,

to grind the white barley and grain.

The song passed between death and daydream:

some vulture rising up above the dead

sent a breeze across the foreheads of living heroes.

Far off beneath the azure sky, it vanished.

Achilles noticed it no more.

E stette Achille ad ascoltare i ringhi
de' suoi cavalli, e piu lontano il pianto
delle Nereidi, e dentro i lor singhiozzi
senti piu trista, si ma piu sommessa
la voce della sua cerulea madre.
Anche senti tra il sonno alto del campo
passar con chiaro tintinnio la cetra,
di cui tentava il pio cantor le corde;
mentre i cavalli sospendean, fremendo,
di dirompere il bianco orzo e la spelta.
Passava il canto tra la morte e il sogno:
qualche avvoltoio, sorto su dai morti,
gli eroi viventi ventilava io fronte.
Lontano ella sotto il cielo azzurro,
e poi vani. Ne piu la intese Achille.  

 Translation DW.

The Forest of Sure Things

                                by Megan Snyder-Camp

NARRATIVE DISTANCE

In two days the rat swam 400 meters

to the other island, also empty, in search of another rat. The scientists

who had been following the rat

grew desperate as the weeks passed

and the peanut butter went stale.

No song from the radio collar.

Their wives wanted a vacation.

It was summer; the bee-bitten lilacs

turn in, some as-yet-unnamed tree

parted a soft slab of rock. They sent another rat out.

And another.

SEASON

The oranges were the first to arrive,

bobbing along the coast like subtitles.

Everything seemed ot carry another name.

Look at me, our mother said. Our lunch

a sacrifice, our hair a knotted map.

The youngest of us watched

his orange peel float out in the lake. The oldest

kept a tally of every shadow

creeping from barn to tree. Each seam,

each bud called out. From the earth

or the sea the next saint would rise.

The middle child carried with her

a scrap of wallpaper from the old dollhouse

and held it up against the shifting sky.

WAKE

The casseroles just showed up.

According to her sister a symbolic casting

of the feminine, not gender but physics, dear --

according to a friend she looked

just like her sister, green bathrobe mid-afternoon,

suitcase still in the trunk.

She'd carried him dead for days.

Out above the reeds a sphere of birds

stretches and knots, rises as one

brown then belly-white. Oh the hunger

when it came filled every chair.

From The Forest of Sure Things, Poems by Megan Snyder-Camp (2010).

The Pure Gold Baby

                    by Margaret Drabble

The children appear before us, the children of Stirling Hall Nursery and Plimsoll Primary and Highbury Barn. Ollie, Nick, Harry, Chloe, Ben, Polly, Becky Flora, Stuart, Josh, Tim, Tom . . .

We had all thought that Sally's Ollie was the bad boy, for whom we feared the worst, but Ollie, after years of teasing Anna and committing other minor misdemeanours, had made good. He now owns a company selling organic vegetables, and a chain of up-market market gardens. He pioneers new eco-friendly planet-preserving glossy shining crops whose leaves deflect and reflect the violent sun. He is a success story of our time.

Big brother Stuart was Sylvie's drop-out boy as a teenager, but he dropped in again, and he;s now a highly paid if moody and dark-tempered barrister. He wears old-fashioned clothes but sports a pigtail. It's a strong message, a strong look.

It was pretty Josh Raven who had hit the headlines, for all the wrong reasons.

I'm afraid to say that we blamed Sylvie and Rick Raven for taking Joshua out of the state schools, to which we were all so loyal, and sending him to a private school, where he was bound to get into the wrong set. How smug we were and how self[righteous. What ideological prigs we were. Yes, he got into the wrong set -- drugs, theft, fraud, remand, court, conviction, jail. The choir-boy turned crook, the toxic luminous lamb, the public-school swindler. It was quite a story. We blamed the school, we blamed Sylvie and Rick for sending him there. The had to blame somebody. It was hard to blame Josh, whom we had known when he was so very little, when he was in a state of grace, before he went to the bad. We had known him as a baby in a pushchair, as an angel in a nativity play, as a child gazing rapt at modest indoor fireworks at Christmas. There had been no harm in him then, no sign of Original Sin.

Young Harry Grigson, Harry with the strawberry birth mark on this face, had also been blame less. But at the age of twenty he had climbed into the lions' den at London Zoo in Regent's Park, confident that he could lie down with the lion like a lamb. There was no harm in that faith, only delusion. The lion mauled him and he nearly died. He now spends his days in an institution, on one of those many institutions. It is not as pleasant as Halliday Hall was in the old days. The doctors say he is schizophrenic, but what is in a word? He is heavily medicated. We don't know if he still hears voices. We haven't seen him in years

* * * * * *

Our little children, what becomes of them? They set off so innocently on their long journey. It is hard to bear, it is hard to grow old and see the children age and suffer. It is hard to see them grow bald, and estranged, and some of them lonely.

* * * * * *

from Margaret Drabble, The Pure Gold Baby (2013).

Easter Wings

        

                             Lord, Who createdst man in wealth and store,

                                    Though foolishly he lost the same,

                                         Decaying more and more,

                                                 Till he became

                                                   Most poore:

                                                   With Thee

                                                O let me rise,

                                        As larks, harmoniously,

                                   And sing this day Thy victories:

                            Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

                            My tender age in sorrow did beginne;

                                  And still with sicknesses and shame

                                       Thou didst so punish sinne,

                                                 That I became

                                                  Most thinne.

                                                  With Thee

                                               Let me combine,

                                    And feel this day Thy victorie;

                                 For, if I imp my wing on Thine,

                             Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

                                  by George Herbert (1593–1633)

Knockturn

KNOCKTURN

                by Bob Hicok

Tiptoeing through the grass

not to wake the grass, sheet music

for the laments all over the field

like wings of moonlight, crickets

hushing their banter around my ankles.

then remembering they're an ocean

once I've passed, I enjoy thinking of solitude

when I'm alone as the spouse of living

with others, who are often sharp

in my experience and pointy, people

are like scissors, you shouldn't run with them,

I should go back and tell my wife

my skin is a photograph, a slow exposure

of stars she can touch

with the swirls, the galaxies

of her fingerprints when she wakes

and gives me the dream report,

decades she's been late for a test

or taken it naked, I would go

to that school, I would major

in Yes, the dark is my favorite suite to wear

where bear are also

sometimes, and coyote, and the dead

get to be whatever they want as far

as I can tell, the less I can see,

the more personally I take the little

I can make out with,

holding what I am held by, the night

and I almost the same smudge

of whatever this is, it is seductive

to wade into and slip away and not drown,

my life the only thing that has been with me

my whole life   

From Bob Hicok, Elegy Owed (2013).