Mycenae, city of kings,
quiet
in the heat of noon;
spread here over the hill like a
gypsy rag, sun-pegged to dry;
the gnat-like voices slip on the
polished stone,
slide into crevices of time, are
lost;
the silent alley-ways lie open;
only the ants drag anguished
burdens, carefully
from step to step,
absorbed in their own closed
ritual;
the tombs are torn apart, the
courtyards tumbled, bare;
lizards move their dark thoughts
down the cistern walls,
cool, secret, deep.
The sun burns down;
and Agamemnon sleeps.
The thin brown goats are scattered
down the rocky gorge,
lipping at scrub, delicate,
their gentle bells knocking and
tonking,
nailing a hollow music to my
heart;
dead dust drifts round my feet;
warm bees trace golden terraces of
yesterday,
turning their upland wings bright
in the silky air;
and still in the valley, lapped in
a silvered sea of olives,
Agamemnon dreams.
No thoughts of wife or child come
near him;
no thoughts of Clytemnestra rock
his heart;
the blood-burst robe falls from
the web of memory, is lost;
Iphigenia, doe-eyed, slips away,
remembered threads all drifting;
some small dead deeds of honour in
a foreign land,
what are they now?
He dreams, I dream,
of the constancy of warm, wild
bees and honeyed thyme,
of the purple hearts of figs, of
barley bread;
he also hungers for the low, clear
calling of the browsing bells,
the thin brown goats,
that hang a beaded brightness on
the guardian air
and circle still
Mycenae, city of kings,
quiet
in the heat of noon...
(October,
1986)
