Poetry Corner

Among the bleached bones of the city of Artemis

Sic transit gloria mundi: The Library of Celsus at Ephesus

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Early in my long term of military service I was stationed in Turkey, where at that time the US armed forces kept many electronic eyes and ears focused on the USSR. One long weekend a friend and I traveled by bus to the ruins of Ephesus, which from the Classical to the early Byzantie period was one of the most important cities of Asia Minor. Then as now it was a popular tourist destination. The memory of that visit has remained with me, and about ten years ago I was moved to set it down in verse.

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A Visitor to Ephesus

He traces with a hesitant finger,
Upon a cracked and tumbled marble block
Some decree of Hadrian Augustus.
Then, hearing what seems to be a whisper,
He turns to face the city’s sad remains.

And Ephesus, whose pavements he has paced,
Now speaks in the dry, stony accent
Of the parched Ionian wind that sweeps
The sands along its broken avenues:
Telling of where the ships have gone,
Whose sails across her harbor blossomed once;
Telling of the actors, nameless now, who trod the stage
Of her roofless theater; telling how the voices
Of her storied orators were stilled.

You ask, she sighs, why these my marble bones
Now bleach beneath the azure, pitiless Aegean sky.
Long years ago, dread Artemis, my patron,
Went missing. Evil upon evil flowed from that:
Earthquake, ruin, rape, the conqueror's yoke.
It was the river, though, that killed me in the end.

He finds a shady spot and sits awhile—
Thinking, perhaps, of Boston or New York.