From time immemorial rumor has it
or better still the notion is abroad
that there exists a way out.
SAMUEL BECKETT

Via Brigantium, Via Dolorosa, the road
goes right across the continent
and ends where a shabby city—shipyards,

warehouses, a tangle of railroad tracks—
empties itself into the brown and sluggish waves.
I was here, and I return here in dreams,

carrying a bundle of rumpled snapshots,
yearbook picture, postcards addressed
to the old comrades, never mailed.

I was here, haunting the cathedrals,
art collections, coin shops, scouting
the cafés for a flash of tit or thigh.

My passports photos, bearded or barefaced,
are of outlanders mostly, foreigners all.
It is cheese or olives or a glass of wine

or a phrase of music—even a single treble voice
sustained between high white walls
and azure sky—that lets me greet these strangers

and lets us huddle over the maps and journals.
And the choices not made confront us still.
The hordes jostle in daily unease: above—

nervous behind the shining visors
of their faith—the pilots rein in their obedient
machines; below, the mothers arrange

upon the altar-stones the broken remains
of their children. The singer I hear in the sun-washed
alley under the marble battlements is surely

Medea holding aloft handfuls of rubies
that spill over the cobbles, Medea the terrorist,
the teller of truth that will not be heard except

as lovely song and fairytale. I am standing again
at the sea's edge, the sea-wind carrying
the cries away over the crumbled concrete,

the dark puddles, the charred tree stumps. Here I am
holding my two sons by the hand. At the cost
of others, snagged in the tongue-tying thickets

of need and custom, at such cost I cannot ask
the glittering god of spear and gun and bomb, turning
his gaze upon my boys, to speak the word and spare them.

Sow's Ear Poetry Review, Vol IX, No 2