Best Callimachus Poems
I’m not some filthy ****
who calls your poems
a joke; I like them.
But here’s advice,
take it or ignore it:
You lard a poem with myths
that weigh it down; half
the young no longer know them.
In the next poem you introduce a talking door.
Do doors talk in Verona?
You use diminutives to excess,
little this and little that,
perhaps some little thing
is worrisome to you.
Virgil wrote of agriculture,
Lucretius physics,
you count our kisses –
a thousand, hundred, hundred thousand kisses kissed,
too many kisses to account for.
For you breezes are like overdrafts,
kisses coins, and lost investments
are like losing love.
You probably count the napkins after dinner.
As for metrics, I’m old fashioned,
prefer the epic beats and elegiac,
not the polymetrics and the tricky
new ones you employ.
You steal from Callimachus
and from Sappho too.
Worse of all you mix artifice and feeling.
It’s time you found a manly voice
to speak of love and pleasure as we know it, not from some book.
Upon the shores of Alexandria’s gleam,
A Library rose, ambition’s dream,
Where scrolls amassed like autumn leaves,
And scholars spun what mind achieves.
Muse-haunted halls, papyrus gold,
Ptolemaic hands, ambitions bold,
Zenodotus and Eratosthenes,
Measured Homer, measured seas.
Callimachus penned the Pinakes’ art,
Cataloging wisdom, knowledge’s chart.
Hero taught as numbers demand,
While diacritics shaped the poetic land.
Yet history’s tide began its turn,
With exiles forced and scrolls to burn.
Caesar’s fire, a shadow cast,
Yet stubbornly, the Library lasts.
Through Roman years, the dust grew deep,
Support grew thin, the scholars weep.
War and wrath swept ancient halls,
Until silence claimed the marble walls.
Serapeum’s shadow lingered on,
A haven for minds, though nearly gone.
Swept away by decree and strife,
Lost forever, Alexandria’s life.
So knowledge bloomed and knowledge waned,
In Alexandria, wisdom reigned
Until the world forgot its name,
But I'm here to bring back it's fame.
I hate political poems. Not for me,
the human wad that clogs the great high way.
A love that’s everyone’s business? Forget it. A drink
from the common trough? No, thanks. The public: yuck.
— from the Greek
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