Graeme Hetherington: Two Poems

After “The Bacchae” of Euripides

Along a path exposed to view

For forty yards or so below

My third floor room in which I taught

Greek Tragedy there minced a young

 

Bejewelled, bearded commie prof

In tightly fitting leather gear,

Tossing his perfumed shoulder-length

Dyed Che Guevara hair back from

 

Glazed eyes, while lost-soul students danced

Attendance all around, hooked by

The new permissiveness. Through slits

In blinds drawn to the narrowest

 

To better focus hate, I watched

And willed that he would fall to bits

Before he reached the library.

As Pentheus parting the leaves

 

High in a tree observed the rat-

Bag Bacchus exploit his divine,

Effeminate, eastern allure

To win the disenchanted to

 

A life of no holds barred. And this,

Even though Peeping Tom, Thebe’s king,

Had banned the cult as threatening law

And order, when in truth it was

 

His own suppressed, morbid desire

For things forbidden, whispered of,

And fear that wine and revel would

Let slip the leash, that had led him

 

To this disastrous, dire extreme.

And spying him, the celebrants,

Drunkenly lusting for blood tore

Him down and into pieces, as

 

Nearing the stacks my bête noire with

A glance at the venetians might

Have brought them, fluttering slightly just

As did that ancient foliage,

 

To the notice of his maenads,

Most of whom, frenzied, minds wiped out,

Would soon come trooping to a class

To hear me lecture on the play.

Graeme Hetherington

 

Light in Darkness: A Case of Déjà Vu

Loveliest of Tasmanian towns,

St Helens in the East was where

My parents from the weather-cursed,

Bleak mining-town infested West,

 

Its convict-underpinned, backward,

Isolated and remote

Sunset-opposite honeymooned,

And I was luckily conceived

 

Before, on their return to work,

The darkness of my childhood fell.

Protected by this antidote,

A sensing even in the womb

 

Of love, their joy in milder days

And seaside strolls, stopping to watch

The dignity and gliding grace‑

Fulness of pelicans and swans,

 

By also wondering with them at

Street names like Atlas, Perseus,

Poseidon and Cecilia, I

Survived, such words heard faintly as

 

Mysterious disposing me

To escape into myth and art

When it was time to choose a life.

All this unearthed, known in old age

 

From following the call of blood

To find my way back and again

Experience these things that I

Might end in light as I began.

Graeme Hetherington