David Mason: Every Sailor in Homer, Athens and A Killing

 

Every Sailor in Homer

As every sailor in Homer knew

the weather is open to fluke

and temper.

 

You’re at dusk in a sanguine sea,

the sheets slack and oarsmen at rest,

when suddenly

 

the mainsail bursts and you’re keel-over-hull.

It fills and bursts and you’re keel-

over-hull

 

and your lungs are full and your eyes go wide

and you tear at the sea with the sea inside

of you.

 

O every sailor in Homer knew.

And every farmer who went to bed

in his house

 

that a wind can slam the house at night,

that shutters can slap the walls till you rise

in a fright

 

and stumble through the feeling dark

like a blind man shutting his shutters tight

in the dark.

 

As every farmer in Homer surely knew,

as anyone near the Aegean knew,

the weather

 

could turn on you. It could turn on you.

And everyone, everyone knew it could turn

on you.

                David Mason

 

                    Athens 

            After Kostis Palamas 

Here the sky is everywhere, sun everywhere,

and everywhere like Hymettian honey

out of marble the yellow wildflowers stare.

Olympus is born, and sacred Pentelis.

 

The axe digging down will find only beauty.

Gods, not mortals, live in Cybele’s breast.

Twilight gashes fresh wounds in the city,

darkening, violet. I go home to rest.

 

Temples and the holy olive groves are here,

here the squirming caterpillar crowd

moves slowly, as if on a white flower.

 

A people of relics live and reign here,

souls in the millions, lightning in a cloud,

the darkness I wrestle with, hour by hour.

                                   David Mason

 

A Killing

A man lay bleeding in Bourke Street.

He went to help a stranger

and the stranger stabbed him in the heart.

 

A man lay bleeding in Bourke Street.

He bled out to his name

like a hero from a book.

 

But to his friends

the man who lay bleeding was not

a hero from a book.

 

Even to me he was a man with a face

and a voice, a man

who once served me an apple tart.

 

His life was both more and less than a name.

Everything that was not a name

and everything that was

 

leaked out as the man

lay bleeding. Then his name

flew everywhere at once

 

but the life behind the name,

the life without a name

was gone

 

back to where it came from,

before the street became a street,

the knife a knife.

                                    David Mason