Five Poems by John Bennett

 

The Marble Woman Above Athens

 

The figures in ether

Never fade,

Or ever slowly decline.

 

Instead, they hover,

Calm and quiet;

A pose in marble, an indelible shine.

 

Sculpted woman, cool and gray.

Through time you’ve stood

As you do today.

 

Each careful gesture formed and grooved.

Warm yet grand,

Poised and smooth.

 

Your vestigial faces

Are reminders of healing vigils

And cleansing rituals.

 

In your image

Are precious, lost, but present spirits.

Come down, through the ages.

 

A splendour of beauty, noble in stone

Over Athens she stands

Gracefully gazing upon her home.

 

 

To Greece we return

 

To Greece we return, through the forest we roam.

Across the Aegean we rode, upon the foam, 

to where we are welcome, there awaits our home.

 

There, the native Gods number many

and trade their gifts freely.

Thus, Apollo with the basket of sagging vine

and Dionysus with the crisp, painted line.

 

They, together, manifested in minds

while masked phantoms of Greek actors

began their haunted music

and sang in chanting rhymes.

 

Telling of how the tears of Oedipus,

though he tries,

cannot escape

his regretful eyes.

 

To his fate Oedipus resigned,

and so a king grows passive.

How could mere chance align

so many interwoven collapses? 

Was the cause of his fate some force, divine?

Or some urge within him, grown malign?

 

A procession of invasive images,

fear and pity strike hearts in the theater.

The chorus cries out

an uproar of lamentation:

 

“Where will you go?” calls the retinue, after their fallen king.

“Who do we turn to now?” cries one.

“When love is forlorn?” cries another.

“When the gods cast a pall?” groans one more.

“Will new heroes let us down?” they wonder aloud.

 

The more keenly the king suffered

the more closely the audience gazed,

on his eyes, sealed shut- now

a two-way mirror of suffering memory. 

 

“These evil pregnant spiders: fate and society!

they trapped us in their web, woven to catch those now to guilt, 

like an honest woman caught in a rare lie-

but why blame her, when the web has us all?

 

Curse these lamentations; away with these images.

They must end if we are ever

to see clear to our true desires. Seeing desire.

Find the splendorous blushing thing

in the reveries and rituals of spring.”

 

Like swallowed gold, ecstatic clarity

is the prize taken by a startled few.

Yet each seat faces the sea,

and every seat sees the stage.

 

Keenly he suffers, closely we gaze,

until the procession leaves the stage.

Some others, called good citizens,

hasten on with their days.

 

Yet, our grateful relief,

in huddled whispers we pronounce-

while the others,

with fond reverence for nothing, slouch.

 

To Athens we’ll travel,

no more will we roam.

For where we are welcome-

there awaits our home.

 

 

In the Roman wilderness

 

The people looked back in mourning,

as upon a vision they had lost;

an image of their fulfilment

in giving honour to their gods.

 

Do you see the sepulchred columns

gently laid at rest,

by the hand of a forgotten deity,

in the Roman wilderness?

 

Gone are the days

of self-effacing ennoblement

on the hills of that island

across the Aegean.

 

The halcyon hills rang out in Spring

in an echoing chorus

from festivals that marked the season

with new wine, cries of grief, and shrieking joy.

 

On stage an actor holds up a groaning mask

a symbol of shock that brings the people in thrall.

The stage on these haunted evenings

was a radiant mural painted with restless night.

 

At the theatre they had gathered for the long-awaited performance

and were left astounded;

filled with fear and pity, yet

with the calm and purified minds

 

of those who found favour

with both Apollo and Dionysus.

They sat in sublime gratitude,

for the priceless reward of catharsis. 

 

At home, votive candles are slowly burning

their ancient warming glow,

to illuminate the alters, smooth with ashes,

as families smile at banished woes.

 

At the alter smooth with ashes,

where the treasured past is never robbed,

they marked the memory of their parents,

and the blessings of their gods.

Oedipus Can Not Cry

 

His sewn together, squinting eyes 

preserve the look of cursed surprise.

 

Before we count the reasons

that this man was so unblessed,

let us stand among the chorus

or join and witness in the audience.

 

A problem arose: The man felt alone,

except for ghosts of deeds yet unatoned.

Whether in castle or hovel,

he enjoyed no true home.

 

With friends, with lovers or family,

he found a moment’s glee,

at which he’d suddenly turn,

and shudder to dimly see

 

that all his riches, all his reason,

all his orderly schemes

of life and of seasons,

and of valorous dreams,

 

gave way to a growing

and comfortless silence.

Among those seated in theatre rows,

looking up to Oedipus, from seats just below-

 

They wonder what spirit rules his fate.

What was the source of his seminal hate?

Is there any worthy cause for such withering pain?

Will he bear yet more? How would we bear the same?

 

They imagined themselves,

while seated in rows,

joining in with the chorus

to sing loudly of woe:

 

“Grieve for your youth, for your mother, your father, your soul!

You have made your decisions.

You must watch them unfold.

You have done the forbidden:

Laid down with your own.”

 

Up looks the audience

as choral figures pass by;

what a morbid sight, this fallen king,

even to calloused eyes.

 

“Look back with regret

on the fruits of your anger!

Seen through your veil

over bitterly born tears!”

 

Tears that cannot drip

from those hardening scars.

“Why did you, oh King,

take Jocasta’s pin to your eyes?  

 

It was not lack of sight

that made you blind,

nor will piercing your eyes

let you unsee.

 

You needed your vision,

for you’ve fallen from grace.

Now you’ll be banished to a faraway region

not knowing whether they’ll welcome your face.

 

You trouble your daughters

with self-pitying prayers that you say.”

The haunted, upright and fugitive figure

stirring up dust, to his fate, walks away.

 

With soft, featureless eyes,

sightless, he faces dry alluvial plains.

Sightless, itching patches of scabs,

are all that remains.

 

All that remains is all that he’s seen,

and a warm, endless, aching sensation

of a blind yet reflexive and beckoning gleam

cast from us, as we gaze on his creation.

 

 

Rupert Brooke and I Confront the Sphinx, A Play in Two Parts

 

Part I

 

With Rupert Brooke I wander

Among the gleaming ancient dead

Whose warm hearts shine more brightly

Than the faces of the living, seething red.

 

Brooke and I first met as planned

-on a windy road- resurgent.

Sun and wind inviting life,

On a morning in the Spring.

 

We set out to the Sphinx

To challenge what she will say.

She sharply words this riddle,

As her claws grip life in sway:

 

“I am in plain sight, I cannot be seen.

I am what you’ve never done, I am your constant dream.

I cannot be hidden, yet I lurk behind a screen.”

 

Rupert and I trade puzzled glances.

Yet, with jewels of memory intact,

We recall how Oedipus solved her riddles.

And boldly take heart in that. 

 

Sensing this, she lashes out,

“You mortals have no solace, faith, or creed!

No refuge you can turn to

In your time of need.”

 

“Do you wish that we did?” I ask,

Feigning calm. “Would you trouble

Us this way, if we had some haven

From this heartless world?”

 

“Yes,” she smiled, shrewd in her vigil,

honed over the years,

She pompously claims,

“I’d keep spreading fears,

 

And I’ll make nightmares,”

she says, in a lurid boast,

“Long after you two

Are nothing but ghosts;

 

Your havens to me

are ash in a vase, dust on a shelf.

In torment you’re raised,

Each a curse to yourself.

 

When you are lost to a cause,

or dead on a field,

I’ll laugh last at time’s pitiless yield

And the heaping spoils of your paltry ideals.”

 

To this Rupert and I replied,

“Why this zeal of pageantry? Why these schemes?

Why place your poison

into our dreams?

 

Toil in pain? We surely must.

Toll the bell? You one day will.

Yet you’ll never tear asunder

The temple of Athena upon the hill.”

 

Coldly, she snaps, “Your precious Greeks

are no more, their temples lay in ruins,

Spectral joys are the best you’ll find

And you’ll lose them, like olden tunes.

 

Your fleeting joys are shards

Mere fragments you exhume

That fade like unshared memories

Of a soldier’s quiet tomb.”

 

Our blood stirred at this,

“We honour our dead, we cherish their names,

We never forget, even

Blood shed in vain.

 

You’ll never end our reveries

Or rob our secret pride,

While spirits of Dionysus and Apollo

Stand together at our side.

 

You may shriek

and time may moan

And gnaw our faces

And grind our bones.”

 

Lacking a peroration,

We stood proudly in the sun.

“Yes, we know we’re not immortal,

Yet our creation is never done.”

 

In a pose of defiance, we face her.

The Sphinx reclines, amused.

The chorus makes its entrance, marching

As the rhythmic music cues.

John Bennett - is a graduate student studying psychology. His literary and philosophical interests are in Greek tragedy, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Céline, Malraux, and the Beats. John is a combat veteran, having served five deployments. His poetry has appeared in Zenith literary magazine, Issue 3. On Twitter @JohnBen46646181