Greek wayfarers, and other poems

Chapter 6: THE LITTLE SHADE

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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 LITTLE SHADE

No longer that grey visage fix,

Charon,

Asking me how I come to mix

With this pale boat-load on the Styx,

Charon.

I am so very small a Shade,

Charon,

Holding the vase my father made

And toys of silver all inlaid,

Charon.

Ferry me to the golden trees,

Charon,

To isles of childish play and ease

And baths of dove-like Pleiades,

Charon.

Ferry me to the azure lands,

Charon,

Where some dead mother understands

The lifting of my baby hands,

Charon.