More Widely Sage than Plato
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
A cave as classroom with a centaur (wise
And just) as teacher is a place to learn,
Surpassed by none. They straddled with their thighs
Achilles (?) riding Chiron (?)
His horsiness when they began to burn
With knowledge since they needed thinking rest
From surfeit of instruction in the strength
That he infused, an education best
Because it filled them to the fullest length
With everything that god and man and beast
Could synthesize. The fathers brought their boys
To male conflation, stallion man, not priest,
To teach the young ones muscled mental poise.
Because the tutor lived inside a cave
But taught them light, the lads grew sanely brave.
ΑΙΘΟΣUΑ
How things come down, or up, according to
Your viewpoint… Once the word meant “vestibule
Inside the palace of a king,” but through
Millennia, well past Achaean rule,
The word now means a railway station room,
A space for waiting for a winter train
With Christmas shoppers. Once a royal doom
Might be decreed for some man under strain
Inside the torch lit antechamber. Now
Though, even in Ελλάδα, it is just
A place to kick scuffed heels in boredom. How
Things change from royalty to noise and dust
..In Reading’s terminal. Once Jason, keen
….For hazards, waited here to meet his queen.