by phillipw | Jul 12, 2019 | PI, TH
Theoxenos of Tenedos A happy legend sets his [Pindar’s] death in the theatre, in the arms of Theoxenos of Tenedos, for whom he had written a dazzling, unambiguously erotic encomium.[….] Pindar was eighty, dry kindling. The flame of desire burst forth and...
by phillipw | Jul 11, 2019 | Uncategorized
The Pike Essence is beauty. Motion says essence Is beauty, but it lives in stasis too In Keats’ ode. In static incandescense, As in painfully imagined blue Sky higher than lowing sacrifice, The heifer in her fatal garlands lives Eternally. Yet beauty...
by phillipw | Jul 9, 2019 | RO
Roberto Coutiño Albores in Kensington Gardens His eyes are beautiful, the pupils brown With flecks of heaven’s upland meadows set Inside each circlet. They are heaven come To shine in quiet glory. Both are met With blindess: people passing them go blind, Like...
by phillipw | Jul 9, 2019 | BR
Paul Bunyan in the British Library Rare Books and Music Reading Room He Ain’t Today he has a thick, full beard, quite dark The brown but with the slightest touch of red. It’s wavy, too. In fact there’s nothing stark About the whiskers or the man. His...
by phillipw | Jul 9, 2019 | EG
If Egos are Our Masks If egos are our masks and they are made By languages and laws and systems we Don’t understand until a scholar’s weighed In genealogically so we see The heterogeneity which blinds Us, and explains the complicated mess, Then we are like unto drug...
by phillipw | Jul 8, 2019 | SO
Heavenly Messengers Come Down to the Cities of the Plain The possibility of knowing them Intrigued the men of Sodom. (Angels came To Sodom seldom.) Why did God condemn These citizens to rained-from-heaven flame And brimstone? Wouldn’t you have wanted...
by phillipw | Jul 8, 2019 | FR
Barraqué, Un Homme Piquant comme Moi The newer teacher didn’t know me long Before he asked, “You are a tetchy friend, Aren’t you?” Mais oui, I think that it is wrong For friends to treat us badly. There’s an end To that discussion. What’s the use,...
by phillipw | Jul 8, 2019 | IS
Christian and Muslim in North Africa Devoted as that Berber, Augustine Of Hippo, Antonin defends belief. Why shouldn’t he? The young man’s mind is clean, As clean as desert dunes without relief From blasts of wind and brutal sun, as pure As cool oasis water, still,...
