‘Lucan and the Muse’ & ‘Iqrit’
Photographer - Tobi Brun
Lucan and the Muse
No sweetheart, Rome's epic muse. Only her keen
cold throat could sing a suicidal queen
sublimely burned impaled. With eyes pried shut,
ears can see blood purpling out of the gut
of sworded Dido. Her unstately face
warps a last Punic shriek the flames enchase,
a backspun echo of the bastard day
the children of the One that Got Away
met Hasdrubal and Carthaginian
peace sickened to cliché. Arms of a man
warring through rains of mythos, Virgil lays
lines supple. Even the caesura plays
accents into discant patterns round the line
styling unorthodox with superfine
into immaculate. Put to occasion
new worlds of taste, paced like a good persuasion.
Intuition refined plucks at bane's harp.
Others are much more point-blank. Dark and sharp
with a horrendous sanity between
exquisite gasconades that steal the scene
at court, and history's rumble, Lucan comes
like a revenge of Muses at the drums,
most metal of all music, loud and real
battering, proud like pounding wings of steel,
battering, beating far beyond all doubt,
like something come to beat those tuning out
a mass grave chorus, chorally right and rude
to baritone an ungrieved multitude
with gusts of what it is that really blows
on mountains sanctimonious in snows,
obstreperous on glory, an honest choke
of rhetoric, his godless Music spoke
spring minds that wept at song and knew not why
to tumble in thunder from a shattered sky.
***
So no this Muse is not a gentle one.
Excessive brightness from a summer sun
helps to conceive how dark She gets you. See
a field of daysplashed flowers in Thessaly
beside the woodland where the farmer's boy
runs piping in the green and skips his toy
horse on the streams. Leaves let light trickle on water
from daylight perfect for Her Balkan slaughter
where javelined soldiers wriggle, a boy begs
hacked dad to live and tree-roots snap the legs
of horses who went mad where riders fell.
Her language is the charm of weathering hell
to Man's savannah beast. At her Lucan best,
she's striking as a pilum through the chest
till the heart skips all beats. Gods know where
men got off calling this trick goddess fair.
She is as fair as life has been for most
humans who lived. A sheer Nobody's Ghost,
She stalks in warpaint and a cloak of scalps
to simper Latin as troops hurt on the Alps
in Fate-black humor, redpills you with bodies
dyed in the bright full moon whose face she bloodies.
At Her yoke, feral eras synchronize
under chill stars that scribble on gaped eyes
frosty sharp canticles of humans felled
in dynamos of regimes born, bled & knelled,
till fluent dread of things to come again
is scratched in proverbs on the tender brain.
She strolls to Rome with weird gems on Her fillet,
winks caustic pride at soldiers in the billet,
then trolls at court, bows
crooked, smiles perverse
at Caesars, and haunts docti into verse
singing the victories & aftermaths
with eyes that know the gods are psychopaths.
Of men's deeds, goddeſſe, ſing; of tryumphe ſtrucke
till the heart marvels what the actual fuck
***
To be the Muse's darling, come like Lucan
bemused in the best court a man could puke in,
dream canceling dream. His role unspooled life's roll
for Her. The murderous varier of the soul.
Nero did read him. From the first, it's blood
he wrote in. Flipped out spectacles and gluts
at court churned the grotesque to a lofty mood
for epic where men jagged each other's guts
sans gods or heroes. No such fey disguise
fit his rank Muse in gnarly Thessaly
who paid neronic price for sanity
watching psychosis blow through open eyes.
Art made the artist. Hideously wiser
each day to autocrats' gushes and kinks,
his jiggering plot boiled over in a plot on Caesar
at twenty five. As no throne-squatter thinks
of pardoning the treason of the sane,
he rendered unto Caesar from his vein.
Rome's epic muse is not a poet's wife.
Of Lucan, She asked little. Just his life.
Iqrit
A ruined church upon a hill
lies in today's debris.
I watched an old man praying outside,
with nowhere else to be.
No majesty distracted him.
Only the olive trees
bent as he bent on buried ground
in silence on his knees.
(I'd say "he had unusual eyes,
a voice like an abyss..."
But there is more than poets' lies
to what a person is.)
I had not come to press him for
his life, or even name.
But hearing my ṣabāḥinnūr
he told me all the same.
Much old Arabian verse laments
campsites with nomad love.
Triteness is just the truth of hearts
and homes compelled to move
as men mourn prints in blackrock sand,
weep over stones and roam.
This man had come to mourn his land
without a home at home.
A. Z. Foreman is a literary translator, poet and language teacher currently working on a doctorate in Near Eastern Languages at the Ohio State University. He received his B.A. in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and his M.A. in Arabic Language from the University of Maryland. His translations from Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Old Irish, Occitan, Russian, Old English, Ukrainian and Yiddish have appeared in sundry anthologies, journals and a BBC radio broadcast. He sometimes writes his own poetry if it really comes to that. He divides his time between the bedroom, the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have a dog, he would very much like to pet it.
