the further we get from Greece
weren’t you happy too? Is it worth it to kid ourselves?
That, I’m sure, would not be consistent with being “Greeks.”
Let’s admit the truth now.
We are Greeks—what else are we?
But with Asian inclinations and feelings,
but with inclinations and feelings
sometimes foreign to “Greeks.”
It does not suit, Hermippos,
philosophers like us
to behave like our kinglets
(remember how we laughed at them
when they paid visits to our schools).
Underneath those showily
Hellenized and—what a word—Macedonian exteriors
a little bit of Arabia peeks out,
a little bit of Persia not quite contained
and with what laughable connivances
the poor souls strive to keep that from being spotted.
No, no, that doesn’t suit us.
Such little pretensions do not work for Greeks like us.
The Syrian and Egyptian blood
that flows in our veins is not to be ashamed of.
It’s to be held in honor and flaunted.
The Saving of Julian (unfinished)
the perished Constantine’s kin
finally even a little child, six years old,
Caesar’s son, Julius Constantine’s,
was at risk from their awful frenzy.
Christian priests were compassionate.
They found him and took him to asylum
in the church and saved him there,
the six-year old Julian.
Except in addition one must say
our information is from a Christian source:
It is wholly unlikely to be true—
although there is nothing surprising as history,
Christian priests saving an innocent Christian child.
If it is true would the very philosophical
Augustus say about it
“Let it be forgotten, that darkness.”
Symeon
I know them, yes, his new poems
Beirut is enthralled
Some other day I shall study them
I cannot today: I am troubled somehow.
“More Greek learning than Libanios,” surely!
But “better than Meleager,” I don’t think.
Ah, Mevi, what of Libanios? Books?
Chance brought it about—under Symeon’s column.
I was packed in with Christians
who worshiped and prayed in silence
and knelt—except that I, not being Christian,
did not have their spiritual calm—
and I shook all over and suffered
and I shivered with alarm and I hurt.
Ah, do not smile. Thirty-five years, just think—
winter, summer, night and day, thirty-five
years on that column he stays alive and testifies.
Before we were born—I am twenty-nine years old—
You, I’m sure, are younger than me—
Before we were born, just imagine
Symeon went up on that column
And lives there from that time on in front of his God.
I don’t have a head for work today—
except this, Mevi, nicer for you to tell them:
that (whatever the rest of the wise men say)
I do accept Lamon as Syria’s principal poet.
That Way
In this shameful photograph, secretly sold
on the street—police mustn’t see—
in this whorish photograph
how did there come to be such a face,
Who knows what a cheap life-for-sale you live,
what would have been the repulsive surroundings
when you posed for them to take your picture,
what sort of soul would you have?
But for all that and more, for me you remain
face from a dream, its beauty
shaped and dedicated to Hellenes’ pleasure.
That is the way you remain for me, and what my poem says you are.
“The Rest I Shall Tell Them Below in the House of Hades”
“This line,” the proconsul said, closing his book, “in fact
is beautiful and altogether right.
Profoundly philosophical, Sophocles wrote it.
How many things we shall say over there. How many things we shall say.
And how different we shall look.
These things that we carry like sleepless guards,
blows and secrets we keep inside
in a hard struggle day to day
there we shall tell them free and clean.”
“Add,” said the sophist half-smiling,
“if over there they say such things, if they care.”