Into the East

Another poem inspired by the Odyssey. This time, the opening verse (in slightly modified form) is taken from lines 3-4 of book 12. Homer has an amazing ability to, at one and the same time, encapsulate the gritty and blood-soaked reality of ancient Greece in the beautiful language of nature and divinity. I restricted myself to the latter here, however, so no blood and guts this time around. This poem is also substantially longer than usual, but you can chalk that up to an extended gestation period - I've been working on it for about two weeks, now, whereas most of my poems are written in an hour or two over the course of one afternoon.


Into the East

Summering dawn has her dancing grounds there,
the sun has his rising sheen,
in the chimeric lands of the once-everywhere,
which no mortal eye has seen,

for hull cannot carry the compassing rose
on gossamer winds that fly
from ambrosial sands where the white goddess goes
and cormorants furl and cry,

and days are all one in the bright birthing bed,
as never a dusk to descend
with sable-soft coverlet crested in red;
beginning there begets no end,

and rolling of time reckons out a return,
as fresh as so many before,
to rise on the fires that endlessly burn
beneath the impregnable shore

where, youthful, the years of the old ages, fell
and free of the cindering star,
in arc through the firmament, wild and well
as ever the fields, afar,

name numberless days in Olympian song
that humans cannot harmonize;
our half-lilted note does not linger so long,
but sinks with the sundown, and dies,

and yet it remains in the land of the dawn,
where wakes every morning anew
the canticled sun, as the shadows flee on,
before the bright-carpeting dew.