Fading Feeling

18 June 2022

In our peculiar way,
we were always ones
striving for form, and by form
we meant something enduring,
unchanging, but how much upheaval
and violence it took to learn
how now this striving must change.

For Helen's sake, let us remember
the ways of our fathers,
sea-tossed as they always were,
reaching from darkness
like tentacles on Ocean's floor.

We are like them now, and must be,
having seen once for all
the formation of cracks
in the old Greek edifice,

And thus we must not always be,
knowing full well that not every Greek
bearing gifts can be trusted, but also that
we are not trustworthy either, so long as
we think with stiff minds, and that after all
this is what Plato meant. But in our peculiar
Greek way we are stiff like ones trained for a phalanx,
though soft and bourgeois enough,
not fitting in with ourselves, and not really
belonging here either, no better than anywhere--

Thus we must not always be,
we must fade, like a breeze on a soft summer night,
or the call of an eagle near mountains,
and make some new way for the feeling to come.