Greek wayfarers, and other poems

Chapter 56: ON THE THOROUGHFARE

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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.

ON THE THOROUGHFARE

To-day I go to buy some dates

From Glyco’s cart.

“Ten cents,” my smiling fruitman states,

And then we part—

I to the mart,

He for the next fig-buyer waits!

Back to my world I go, its keen

Quick energy

And competitions sharp and mean,

Its flippancy,

And sophistry,

And tampering with things unclean;

But Glyco waits; he has ten cents;

And he has hope,

And back of him, antecedents

Give him such scope!

With his traditions’ affluence

I cannot cope!