GONE
(I was reading Thucydides, The History of
the Peloponnesian Wars. After I had come
upon the term the third time, I stopped and
found a lengthy history and analysis in
Wikipedia of the word “hoplite.” Of course,
I had known that they were Greek
“soldiers,” “like the Romans.…”)
Aspersion and Judgment
Like hoplite brothers
We field scorn and slashing
Like wheat scythed down
Hardmuscled, final change
In the last turn of hours
The breath on the cuttings
Then dry wisps of age
Old hair and philosophers
The sun on God’s shoulders
Baked, formless clay land
The grooves in the ground become
shadow
Gone in the wind a promise
Seeds that would be a kingdom
Words that no longer matter
2 thoughts on "GONE"
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I’ve spent a long time jostling, juggling, and picking at the thought that Classical Antiquity permeates our lives, on manifold levels, every day: take our language’s Latin roots, the pillars the American Renaissance studded across these old, palatial homes with which our city’s nearly littered, polluted ideas of Democracies, Republics, etc.; the stalwart, albeit baffling, cleave Antiquity threw ‘twixt body and mind… just to name an obvious few. I read once that Philip K. Dick, perhaps blasted on amphetamines, was cruising through California and saw it morph into ancient Rome. Isn’t that wild, that Antiquity still brusquely stirs in the cultural consciousness? In poetry especially, all those old rhymsters so well-versed in the classics and classical myth that the renaissance resurrected; I learned about Apollo and Sophocles in high school. Why does that culture stand the test of time so stoically, or, what’s more, why is our culture still buttressed by its musings? I would think often, as though a silent refrain, “At war with the Antiquity,” as though it was my lot, my duty to create novelty in the world, new myths like Blake did maybe. Still though, a certain (albeit ironically forgotten) translation of “Lysistrata” is second only to Coward’s “Hay Fever” in making my cackling cheeks hurt.
I love the line, “The sun on God’s shoulders//Baked”. It calls forth, for me, the epic scope of immensity that coincidence or coercion balled up in our little Earth here.
I actually think Thucydides and how he describes his war is extremely current. An unnecessary conflict caused by Athens’ pretensions to domination of the region and empire. A more than appropriate mixing in of sometimes helpful, sometimes less than credible rhetoric in stonewalling and ass covering speeches by leaders from both sides, with persistent cautions and disclaimers as to sources, facts and methods that is amazingly like our government’s and modern media’s fast and loose play with any attempt at objectivity in dealing journalistically with current affairs which will ultimately be part of history. Empire, rumors, blunders, Lies, decadence. No change in 2,500 years. I see it as a depressing finality and a somewhat bleak prospect.