Poem - Iowa Fields

Iowa Fields

to Epicurus

I saw Ilium gleam

As her walls, in a dream,

Watched her sons return home on their shields--

Saw the marching Greek host

In the corn, and the coast

Of Asia in

Iowa fields.

The philosophers spoke

In the shade of the oak

As the willows and cottonwoods reeled

In an October gale

Blowing hearty and hale,

Pages flipping in

Iowa fields

And I wrote out your name

On the face of the stream,

Writ in water but never repealed--

Made your garden to bloom

Like the yucca, festooned;

Flowering lonely in

Iowa fields.

And your precepts I pressed

Like a stamp to my chest--

And a ring on my finger revealed

Where your likeness was cast

And a voice from the past

Rose up godlike in

Iowa fields.

I hoped to see thee again

By the feld or the fen

When the bells of the Twentieth pealed.

But--alas! lies my ring

At the end of all things

In a grave beneath

Iowa fields.

Thank you;

I did up the last stanza first, and wrote the rest as prelude. What I am beginning to understand is that so much of my thinking about Hellenism, philosophy, Epicurus, art, poetry, love, literature etc. is shadowed--I do not say overshadowed--by the hue of mortality. Some will, no doubt, find something morbid in this. A sickness of the soul--the sigh of Ecclesiastes, who has made the diagnosis (that life flows quickly, and leaves very little behind), but did not, could not, know the cure. (A god-shaped hole?)

But there is no sickness. No diagnosis to be made. I am not diseased. Not a god-shaped hole, but a whole, atomic in its unity, that needs no gods. I am merely, complete-ly, human. Nothing human is alien to me, said Terence. No man is an island, said Donne. Perhaps the old priest knew as much as the pagan poet after all.

I was 29 years old when I learned that the flower of the yucca was edible. Every lakota boy would have learned that by the age of 4. How many yuccas went untasted by me? The pleasures that salve us are all around; will we see them? We will learn of them in time; those natural palliatives? Not a cure, for we need and want no cure, but a sweetness, the scent of which lifts our heads to ever-higher glories. A light that shines on us in the dark; not like the copper's torch, to catch us slinking in fear; but like the stars, shining into a dim close wood, and finding us rising, rising to their shining!

-josh