The poem that “did it” for me.

August 4, 2022

I don’t like all poetry.  But let's put it this way: I don't have a poetry problem. And recently I found this poem in a book of quotations, and it finally was the poem that "did it" for me. 

II. Mycenae

Give me your hands, give me your hands, give me your hands.

I have seen in the night
The sharp peak of the mountain,
Seen the plain beyond flooded
With the light of an invisible noon,
See, turning my head,
Black stones huddled
And my life taut as a chord
Beginning and end
The final moment:
My hands

Whoever raises the great stones sinks;
I've raised these stones as long as I was able,
I've loved these stones as long as I was able,
These stone, my fate.
Wounded by my own soil
Tortured by my own shirt.
Condemned by my own gods,
These stones.

I know that they don't know, but I
Who've followed so many times
The path from killer to victim
From victim to punishment
From punishment to the next murder,
Groping
The inexhaustible purple
That night of the return
When the Furies began whistling,
In the meagre grass -
I've seen snakes crossed with vipers
Knotted over the evil generation
Our fate.

Voices out of the stone out of sleep
Deeper here where the world darkens,
Memory of toil rooted in the rhythm
Belated upon the earth by feet
Forgotten
Bodies sunk into the foundations
Of the other time, naked. Eyes
glued, glued to a point
That you can't make out, much as you want to:
The soul
Struggling to become your own soul.

Not even the silence is now yours
Here where the millstones have stopped turning

I'm not sure the poet, George Seferis, did much else other than work devastatingly hard as a diplomat and write poetry for his friends. He saw great strife throughout his life, he saw interesting times, moments of great beauty, and the grief from the collaps of the democratic government he loved so much in Greece.

I like just this, that George Seferis didn't write anything about art, or poetry, or politics, h just wrote about what I was like to exist in interesting times. I guess that's poetry in the raw, but I don't claim to know anything about what poetry should be.