Poem: Athena

It is October, 2003. I am alone in Athens for an afternoon. I stand in the ruins. The Acropolis is all beauty, to the point of tears. I don’t know that I have ever wanted to weep for beauty’s sake before. The human heart seeking so to soar, that I ache to see it, breaking my own on such souls.

My God, here I stand,

At the temple of Athena, in ruins,

The sun slants across the rocky hills

Glinting on the hill of the muses,

And on the distant mountains ringing the city,

And on the glimmering among gaps between hills,

the sea, shining like yellow diamonds in the sun.

From down the hill, echoing from

the broken Odean theater of Herodes Atticus,

a woman sings, her voice rises like these pillars

to the sky, echoes from these stones,

as strong as they ever were.

While tourists mill about, talking, as if so much shining bright is nothing,

And joy, gold in the air itself,

Joy luminous and palpable,

Flying from hill to hill,

blue sky to blue earth;

Where great white columns nearly three eons old rise still,

Testament to the greatest dreams of men, of human beings using their short days

To see the human spirit soar, speaking the greatest longing in the soul,

For beauty, truth: my heart aches at the sight of that longing,

Still alive in the ancient ruins, reaching to the air, to the song: to all that ever matters or ever will.

How could beauty alone bring tears? Yet it does, tears of ache at the beauty, the touch of souls singing through stone, across thousands of years, all like a single day.

At that I guess that the grey-eyed goddess

Must have been a joyous spirit,

To coax a people to such heights, to set their spirits into the air so fast,

To make such leaps of beauty and of hope. If we’re lucky then

perhaps her spirit still haunts these same hilltops,

Smiling kindly on a world lost at sea.

*********************

Now,

Now it seems to me that a divine benificence

Bathes the world in light.

Clouds hide it from us, clouds

In our own spirit, and clouds

In our cultural milieu all around,

Preoccupied with misery, greed, and small things.

But from time to time in spite of it all,

Somehow the clouds part for a moment,

And we stand bathed in the divine light,

Transfixed,

Suddenly at home wherever we are,

At home in the whole wide world,

All one, all one, all one,

Wanting only to build temples, stupidly, try to hold on forever,

Instead of stand still, in the eternal,

For that fleeting moment.

It comes only once or twice in a year’s time,

And a year is like an instant, then life is over, shouting and perplexed.

It’s most easy when the sea is in view, or on a high hill.

For there are magic places where so many have felt that spirit,

The tall cliffs, or the ancient ruins,

Where we return again and again, as if hoping for a lost love to return;

Or some people make it seem easier, as when

I stand in the surf and turn,

To see you sitting in the sun, smiling,

The world stopping for that split second,

Angels dancing, fire on the water.

And then it passes, like a dream, we go on, alive after all,

Wondering at it all, hope rekindled.

****************************

Child of mine, if ever you had been born,

I would have urged you this:

The world is big and broad, and full

Of fabulous stories, and people everywhere are bursting with goodness

And beauty. Yet wherever you go,

bear patiently the five percent who are unpleasant, or petty, or cheating,

avoid cleverly the one percent who are malicious,

(and even more the one percent malicious with silver tongues of disguise),

so as to be freely friends with the ninety percent who seek the good

and are around you all the time, whenever a friend may be needed, to shine with light.