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Greek wayfarers, and other poems

Chapter 55: THE SEA OF TIME
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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 SEA OF TIME

(Sappho sings to Alcæus)

Only our few short hours,
For you and me;
Temples and groves and bowers,
And then—the Sea!
Only our finite word
For you and me,
Who knows what gods have heard
Under the Sea?
Love, though the gold moons wane
For you and me,
We shall not meet again
Down by the Sea.
Ours shall be hidden ways;
For you and me
Stretch the long separate days—
Mist on the Sea!
Artemis—will she say
For you and me
What Law we must obey
Moves in the Sea?
Moves, till the faces worn
By you and me,
Luminous, dream-forsworn
Change in the Sea?
Change, for unending tides
Bear you and me
And the Self in us glides
From Sea to Sea.
Love, shall the sailing souls
Of you and me
Float where new shore unrolls
Rimmed by the Sea?
Comes then the meeting place
For you and me?
Silence ... white bubbles trace
Foam on the Sea!