by Brett Rutherford
After Theognis, Elegaic Poems 293-294
To get what you prefer
above all other things to eat,
and endlessly, is not
the best of all possible worlds.
Not even the Lion
eats every day, and meat,
perhaps, is not his only wish.
That mouth, incarnadine,
might just as well
be stained with pomegranate!
Some days the Lion is out sorts
in indigestion’s agony.
Some days, the sun and wind
are just so splendid
that merely to recline
and flick one’s tail
suffices.
by Brett Rutherford
After Theognis, Elegaic Poems, 267-270
Take any floating thought.
Raise its first letter up.
Lo! Thought becomes
a goddess, throned
at the right hand of creation,
just as mere sunrise,
an everyday event
becomes Dawn
with rosy fingers.
What then of Poverty?
She is well-known enough.
The dictionary spells out
just who and what she is,
yet everyone you ask
says she is somewhere else.
She is nowhere worshiped
at the marketplace. Wall Street
falls silent at the mere utterance
of her name’s first syllable.
The court does not acknowledge her
though Justice meted out
seems corollary. Seek her
in dungeons or in debtors’ jails,
even among the desperate
who sleep beneath bridges,
in vain. Who has two shoes
and nothing else to cover
his nakedness says, “Ask him
with only one shoe what
Poverty is all about!”
No temple, no altar, not even
a single nub of a carving
with eyes the size
of sesame seeds
or a gaping, toothless hole
where hunger emanates —
she is a goddess of nothing,
a nullity. Spinster,
specter,
scorned everywhere, crone
of the averted eye, who
will raise up a shrine to her?
She takes the hand
of those who die unshriven.
Hers is the arm
on which one leans
on the road to Hades,
as the dead man looks back
to see the inheritors fight
over his left-behind treasures.
And she is there,
when the soul of one murdered
and secretly buried
arrives with no coin
for the somber boatman.
From her own purse
she offers one penny
to pay his passage.
She is the Goddess of “over there,”
the guardian of the town’s bad parts.
Her signs are the averted gaze,
the pointed finger.
There — See! Her face
among the crowd of immigrants
at the barbed-wire border.
If you have lived at all,
lived really and truly
you once, or more than once,
broke bread with her.
She merits an ode at least.
by Brett Rutherford
After Theognis, Elegaic Poems 149-154
I’ll tell you this, Cyrnus: some men
should never inherit a fortune.
Having too much breeds insolence.
What danger there is to everyone
when a bad man becomes a billionaire.
He will not mind his business, no:
he will ruin all to stand alone.
Gold in the hand, a sieve
for a brain, a heart
the size of a chicken liver,
a wild boar’s temper.
Take from his small hands
the means to do others harm.
Before his evil, glaring eyes,
draw vertical lines: a cell.
by Brett Rutherford
After Theognis, Elegies, 15-18
O what a fête,
the union of Cadmus
and Harmonia! Down
from Mount Helicon flock
the Graces and Muses.
From high Olympus gods
invisible descend.
One line they sing
in common refrain:
Otti kalon philon esti,
to d’ou kalon ou
philon esti.
The beautiful we love,
but from the plain
we turn our eyes away.
Cruel gods! Each guest
less fair in form
than the perfect groom
and his statuesque
bride, must wince
and go home downcast.
Bless’d by the gods
are the beautiful.
The others, plain,
or lame, or broken,
gap-toothed and riven
with skin less pure
than alabaster white,
must fend for themselves.
Fair ones, beware
the crows of envy!
by Brett Rutherford
Theognis, high in honor
among the archaic Greeks
served Apollo, and thus
he pledged his patron:
“Lord, child of Leto, son
of the lightning-bearing
Zeus of Olympus, I kneel
at your feet and beg
the company of Muses.”
So, too, Theognis
loved every lad whose face
bore any semblance
to Apollo,
abjectly, in the face of scorn.
“First breath, last breath,
and every breath between,
I consecrate to you,” [1]
he swore to the god,
an adoration worth
a thousand poems at least.
But as for me,
I serve a fickle deity:
fleet Hermes who comes
and goes as he pleases,
the one who seldom arrives
by daylight,
but rather in dreams,
in ever-deceptive
masks and guises.
Apollo may bless the poets
who labor patiently
at measured epics. I wait,
instead for Hermes,
the avatar of sudden inspiration.
And, just as Theognis pined
for noble youths
more bent on games and girls,
I spent my youth
on fair-haired orphans,
outcasts and dreamers,
my fellow exiles and reprobates.
Not one of them had a home
to go to; most
had been written out of wills,
turned out-of-doors
to their own devices.
Oft times I sleep
with window open,
so that the god
who makes house-calls
between his errands
may leave me the blossom,
root, or branch
for my next poem,
so too the strays,
scruffy and poorly shod,
may enter at random
when least expected,
in need of caresses.
And thus, through gods
and the shards of gods
on beautiful faces,
the night holds out
against the burning day.
NOTE:
1. The Theognis quotes are paraphrased from his Elegaic Poems, I, 1-4.
by Brett Rutherford
After Theognis, 421-424
Your mouth
should have a door upon it.
Tongues, teeth and spit,
along with thought-aloud
things that ought not fly
into the ears of friend or foe.
Food in, words out, wrath
flung like nut-stones or bones
too tough to chew; worse yet,
the vomit of insult and invective.
A door, I say,
and a padlock, too.
Keep close the key
but leave ajar the slit
through which kind words
and benevolent sighs
may safely issue.
Go not about
with the door wide open,
except for the dentist
and the assured lover.
