If words were enough,?
I'd speak until the sun set on forever,?
Etching you into history with each breath—?
Every line a tribute to the echo of you.
Like Praxiteles chiseling marble,?
I'd carve away the world,?
Until only your essence remains,?
Perfect and unyielding against the tides of time.
But even stone can crumble,?
And memories fade like whispers lost to the winds.?
Still, I’d carve you
Deep into my soul,?
Even when all that remains are ghosts and dust.
Categories:
praxiteles, longing, love, memorial, memory,
Form: Free verse
A whisper of his life within the stone
emerges from the cold of retrospect,
that he behind the figure's vacant stare
could know that other hands saw history
within the reach his fingers stretched, could throw
his burning soul across millenia
and we are there attuned, somehow, to catch
a shred of wisdom, borne upon a gray
and crumbling art.
And do not look apart just yet, for there
is mystery within the telegraph
of ages left to us that may not foil
romance, but prey upon the dying age
that we, ourselves encapsulate in time
to shun mortality.
It is a voice we may not like so much,
unable to attain vitality
that seizes the imagination as
a Praxiteles did, a voice for us
that we may not let go, though photos fall
aside, for this was life incarnate in
the stuff of earth, a transient man come down
to breathe upon us as before.
How still he is! How firm his stubborn grasp
of all we are—how lost are we outside
this quarried slab to meet a personage
that we already knew within ourselves
and fear to know again, lest life and death
in harmony may speak aloud before
we run away.
~
Categories:
praxiteles, art, life, voice, life,
Form: Free verse
Greece you are waiting for me.
With white speechless marbles
within the August heat.
With sullen and loveless areopagites
carving my name on sea-shells.
Hypereides, you liar.
Praxiteles, oh so blind.
You Xenocrates, son of the *****.
And me that I was thought
I would return bearing banners
to rebuild your Thebes.
A roar under the earth.
Ashes in the wind.
Athens rises in the sky
and charges against me.
Why should I be afraid?
Why should I run for a shelter?
No!
I don’t want you to cover my eyes.
I want to see the terror in yours,
when after the execution
you’ll find me at the exit,
waiting for you
with a molotov cocktail in my hands.
Categories:
praxiteles, art, depression, fantasy, history,
Form: Lyric