Read the original here.
Cattle adapted from cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Warriors adapted from Greek pottery.
Read the original here.
Cattle adapted from cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Warriors adapted from Greek pottery.
COUNSELOR: Poetry Crisis Line, what is your emergency?
CALLER: Since we still had some hardtack / how stupid of us / to go ashore and eat
COUNSELOR: Did you stop at some waterfront dive?
CALLER: the Sun’s slow cattle,
COUNSELOR: Oh. Ship’s rations can be bland, but cattle rustling?
CALLER: for each was a castle
COUNSELOR: Oh—cas-tle. I thought you said—
CALLER: you’d have to battle / forty years,
COUNSELOR: You had a hankering for siegefood?
CALLER: till you’d become / a hero
COUNSELOR: So now you are the sandwich?
CALLER: and a star!
COUNSELOR: Oh, are you in one of those places that names sandwiches after celebrities?
CALLER: On the earth’s back
COUNSELOR: How do you know which side is which?
CALLER: we hungered,
COUNSELOR: Is the food better in the front?
CALLER: but when we’d eaten well / we fell to these lower regions / mindless and satisfied.
COUNSELOR: Yeah, that sometimes happens to me when I’ve eaten too much.
CALLER: …
Read the rest of “The Companions in Hades” by Giorgos Seferis here.