Long Thebes Poems

Because the charity of my native place
Obliged me, the broken branches I the picked up
Them giving back him, who was to debase.

Then we finally reached where had to leap
From the second turn to third, and...

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Alexander The Great was born in Macedonia in 356 BC, led to believe
From a boy by Olympias his mother, and to conceive
He was born of the gods, legend inferred he was the son of Zeus,
Ruler...

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Uplifted his mouth from wild and fierce meal
That sinner, it furbishing at the hair
Of head on back of which he had to steal.

Then started: “You want I renew and share
Desperate pain which is pressing my...

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  In the meta-versed binaural wish song beats, 
skid row streets of the bottomless pits of Metropolis/ Thebes, 
you are quardoned off and printed in a likeness 
wronged-vaped, winged
to the wilderness by their covens,...

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If my rhymes rugged and clucking might be
As it would better fit to wretched hole
Above which are pointing all rocks to see,

I would express my concept as a whole
More clearly; but since I do not...

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I recall the day she journeyed to the delta from her village above the first cataphract with a New Kingdom attitude and an Old Kingdom strut, inspiring rumors to be passed from shadoof to shadoof...

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Sappho Translations XV by Michael R. Burch

Gaia, rainbow-crowned, garbs herself in myriad hues. (168c)

We ran like fawns from the symposium: me, Cleis and reckless Gongyla. (168d)

Destiny is from the Muses, / and thus I was...

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Sappho Translations IV by Michael R. Burch

Sappho, fragment 133
translation by Michael R. Burch

Blushing bride, brimful of rose-petaled love,
brightest jewel of the Goddess of Paphos,
come to the bridal bed,
tenderly entice your bridegroom.
May Hesperus lead you starry-eyed
to...

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--Who Has no Tomb to Rest His Soul--

After the long, long wandering in the wasteland,
sometimes by the sea where the roaring wind surges 
the waters, or times in the highland where the dews chill the...

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O some day to come, it may be that time will bury my memory deep as the hidden sleep of those who lie in some forgotten churchyard;
 but my judgment is that the future holds...

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He didn’t have a native land, 
therefore, he had no reminiscences of any sort,
neither good nor ill, other than reckless killing 
at the battlefield where he was compulsorily taken into 
and deployed to fight unwanted...

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I am the face of misery
My life, a dissonance of autumn and spring,
The years are written in the same
Lugubrious, nostalgic grey
How can it be the author to blame?
I cannot scream this all away…
Burn nor Bleed...

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A poem based on the Greek pantheon:


Zeus The Philanderer

Zeus the philanderer, lust divine, 
Maidens fair he did entwine, 
By guileful means he won their trust, 
Bastard offspring born from his lust.

With swan's guise, Leda he...

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Seven is the great number
two times seven is even greater,
Niobe lost all fourteen.

Niobe once was a proud woman
not because she was an Olympian
nor for her beauty excelling to Leto.

Although Niobe was queen of Thebes
the mighty...

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--Who Is That Blind Man?--

I saw a sightless gloomy looking man
and two little girls; walking hand-in-hand
through the deserted field in the dusk.

The man’s eyelids were deeply sunk into 
the socket of the eye and lips...

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homelands / husbands / playing house / strands 
& strings of horses behind strangers lounging 
un-belonging to Thebes of Sevens or women, 
depending on how you slice matters, as a perspective 
as a twisted bark...

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The Sacred Band

To those wearied warriors under the white and orange flame
here is a tale that you should listen
of a Sacred Band of men whose ground in blood they did christen—

One hundred and fifty pairs...

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Holographic forms formed life anew.
As colorful lives on walls came true.
These walls that held secrets from the past,
Ancient secrets hushed unveiled at last.

Hieroglyphs now waking with the dead,
Deciphering gold mask upon the head
Of the child...

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Canonical, orbit, elliptical, prodigal, crown

come back to me reasons and signs and be found in these

Stardust, Sirius, be the scourge of Thebes and of the Sirens of Hades on their knees

   But not...

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O Scribes of Thebes, take the noose, burn fiercely the words of Aleister Crowley.                   
For all the...

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No raised pinnacle marked the place
No pure white limestone shining
Where Ramesses slept looked commonplace
to foil the robbers scrying.
Yet he had moved the earth and sky
this pharaoh disdained all rivals.
His bounty buried beneath the sand
portrayed a...

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--Isn’t She a Daughter of Oedipus?--

Isn’t she Antigone? In search of a fallen prince,
who roams in the battlefield where the corpses of 
defeated warriors lie gruesomely in streams of blood.

Isn’t she Antigone? In search of...

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From Garden of Eden through Thebes
A dream was built of an Adam and an Eve 
Of it the bone of an Adam, comes that of an Eve 
A helper, the name giveth to her by...

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I center myself from within
Toward the gravitational pull of the Ibis
Toward the whiteness that I wish to wear
Away from the darkness of despair.

I am suspended from within.
Suspended between the nothingness
The nothingness between the evil and...

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Bias, one of the Seven, take up neither (when the Persians arrived) an arm
such glorious like the Seven for Thebes, 
nor a book full of wisdom of now.
No.
There is a talk he said, “Omnia mea...

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