Greek wayfarers, and other poems

Chapter 3: THE BLACK SAIL

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About This Book

A lyrical collection evokes ancient and modern Greece through mythic retellings, ritual scenes, and landscape vignettes. Poems range from dramatic addresses to figures of legend to intimate portraits of contemporary Easter processions, seafaring rites, funerary stelæ, and rural labor, using vivid sensory detail of temples, hills, and the sea. Themes of memory, reverence, loss, and cultural continuity recur as the poet moves between narrative lyric, ekphrastic responses to antiquities, and pastoral sketches. The result is a varied formal palette that intertwines classical allusion with observations of everyday life and seasonal celebration.

THE BLACK SAIL

How did it seem, that warm thyme-scented day

When emerald figs hung swelling in the dark

Rose-nippled glooms of laurel and of bay,

And pomegranate flowers burned their spark

Through cypresses, to wait ’neath temple frieze,

Scanning the hermless highways of the seas,

Watching for one white canvas far away,

And when the morning seemed to grow so late,

Going, amaracus and grapes to lay

With reeds and gums on Nike’s stylobate,

Muttering: “’Tis the Day—he cannot fail!”

Then on a sudden, seeing—the black sail!