That greeny stuff about your feet
is asphodel and rightly so,
but why do I think seggans?
And of a spring day
in your days of '71: Poseidon
making waves in sea and air
around Cape Sounion, its very name
all ozone-breeze and cavern-boom,
too utterly this-worldly, George, for you
intent upon an otherworldly scene
somewhere just beyond
the summit ridge, the cutting edge
of not remembering.
The bloody light. To hell with it.
Close eyes and concentrate.
Not crown of thorns, not sceptre reed
or Herod's court, but ha!
you had it! A harrowing, yes, in hell:
the hackle-spikes
that Plato told of, the tyrant's fate
in a passage you would quote:
'They bound him hand and foot,
they flung him down and flayed him,
gashing his flesh on thorny aspalathoi
and threw him into Tartarus, torn to shreds.'
As was only right
for a tyrant. But still, for you, maybe
too much i' the right, too black and white,
if still your chance to strike
against his ilk,
a last word meant to break
your much contested silence.
And for me a chance to test the edge
of seggans, dialect blade
hoar and harder and more hand-to-hand
than what is common usage nowadays:
sedge – marshmallow, rubber-dagger stuff.
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