Alchemisland

Numerologists praising lucky elevens and sevens

Numbing numbers puzzling and unbecoming, potent despite

Like witch-stirred potions brewed on rare moon nights, enabling flight

Impossible by rights yet I thereby gliding despite

Without spite, purely to satisfy and blight with blithe smiles

One slight, short in height, a self nothing denied since it brushed motherthighs

An headstrong, rambrow, to whom none ere posed why

Who professed I always did, I never tried; all privilege denied

Decried now for your violent, silent crimes, disturbing the vine-crept

Pillars who stood pride and mighty while great nations slept

In peapods a millennium from sprouting; before Trevi Fountain

Before armies which shook mountains, numbers yet one couldn’t count to

The fretting and staid stayed needed not such amounts

A place of rabid fanatics; a place of different ways, of Attic plains

Of frantic flames, Homer’s blameless and unbreakable blades

A place with powers of staying beyond museum glass and railings

A place deservedly highted brave, deserved of saving, whose daring raids 

We read of still today, our temples and porticos echo their noble ways

A brat in a gilded pram, full of exhaustingly false praise; ne’er a sage

Ne’er referring to the wisdom of the page, ne’er taking the way paved

Ne’er leaving what had stayed in its place since ancient days

Stones upon which Apollo’s jutting, sun-splitting crown lay

Which Gods of blistering heat, of naked flame, had laid claim

Where well played holy notes stirred sylph motes to motion

And sailors came with odes in throat to propitiate the oceans

He felt little or no need to explain, he will see caves of flames for despoiling

This sacred place, where Gods, heroes, pythons coiled and all their foils 

Fed blood and stories to the soil; lineage and pride of place popped like a boil

A lash and brand across the back of this tactical race, languishing in disgrace

In graceless, fateless modern day; her worn faces remember long times before dates

When crazed maenads roamed sylvan places, silver flood-prone plains 

Reclining listening to relaxing classical, imagining the tactics

The antics, the dramatics, the flanking and muscled flanks, tanklike

Taking the field for ancient battle; we might higher have climbed

Yet in might and vigour and expression of this kind I evince steep decline

Hath any scribe living since that language fit for the Bible written such lines

As all life a mind could ponder; have we gone beyond or absconded

Would they look upon our modern freedoms as bondage

Did they wallow in rank sodom and deserve all they got

Or did they remain steady and steadfast in a world which rocks

And stand prideful despite heaven-hurled rocks and famous rots

All the cyclical poxes which lock us from godhead

Statues with limbs lopped off, without head or helm to doff

Carted away by small-minded toffs

They who had survived the Mongols and the Goths

Who defined long and length and quieted strength

Away from their prided places, their niches and facets, we cannot ask what they meant

By their grave or glorious expressions; we cannot petition the noble dead, who watching

Wept as crept on dread, a stepped on crypt and a sole-branded head

Gladly breaking what corrosive rain, wreathing flame, slaver chains

Had failed to rearrange, gladly taking what all ailments had failed

To displace. Mortals rearranging fates like a table set with plates

The Gods who mortal races created are shamed, flushed about their faces

And complain, bemoaning Prometheus having ever gifted us the fruit of the brazier

We are more brazen now, and more crazy, than in the days of blade and bracer

We do not face each other down, carrying glaive and gladius

Though we do still sail out and reave those weaker places in our radius

We are lost in the mazes which their high minds created

Which our baseness fails to recreate

The statues and friezes which o’ersaw creation are taken away, stored in crates

Sailed many oceans away, to gelid bays, far from any sybil’s cave

Far from where Athena came with owlet talons perched, a berth her veins

Far from the deserved-vain place, of noble ways, of ode-worthy vases

And upon arrival, their prison cases, so like cages, are broken open

The eyes described by Homer see for the first time their inample homes

Far from Rome of all roads, or Rhodes of the heights, far from ocean foam

Far from ancient martial might, when battle horns seemed to stir the sky

We have strayed too far in blunder, plundering these wonders

Which recalled Deucalion’s flood, which never should see London or Dublin

A missing foot, an armless arm crook, as if set upon by stonecrunching truncheon

So that a jumped-up munchkin can boast these, the boldest and best friezes, over London

For this smuggling, for this smug mugging, Hades freezes over; a blow without cushion

Our go-fast age of constant mushing, of to-front pushing, a crass age; we are nothing

Far from something, an age sundered and full of worldstage bluster

We are without sages, without a Janus or adjacent

We are without bravest Jason, bold Thessalian, fleece chasing

His fleet fleet across unmapped channels, unflappable read our annals

Gifted His noble mantle and strong boots we are scarcely fit to handle.