Poetry

Greeks Bearing Gifts

The Greeks, it seems, can live happily with degrees of bitterness— their resin-sharp wine that lightens the evening but needles the unwary throat; their olives, dark as funerals, that commandeer the tongue, then surrender to goat’s cheese, or bread; halva’s lugubrious sweetness, subverted by sesame seed. A harshness that cuts both ways— half-sating a hunger, amplifying a need. Streams of argumentation keep rising from coffee black as pitch. Swallowed by Turk and Greek, it lights a fire in the head, replacing old pharmacopoeias, the season of the witch. When the last Trojan horse was sent out to graze, ships had…

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