. . . cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds
—Tennyson, “Tithonus”
And yet my feet are not wrinkled
(They look so young!)
And neither are they cold
But warm, ready to advance
"Laureate, in classical metres"*
Toward a new horizon
Threshold glimmering or not
As I toward immortality proceed
I write these lines
Dissatisfied with the poems I've got:
All men are not by any means my brothers
All women not my mothers!
Yet I would take rosy-fingered Eos for a bride
If she reappeared on Petra’s Mytilenean shore
Where once I swam and now may swim no more.
Mais où sont les ouzos d'antan! †
* Words misquoted from Dame Edith Sitwell’s “When Sir Beelzebub . . . ”
† François Villon might not object, I suspect, to this adaptation of a famous line from his "Ballade des dames du temps jadis."
November 29, 2024
Comments