Ithaca

Ithaca
after Cavafy

Once, the great statues lined the silk road.
Their names were ‘goddess’, ‘lion’, ‘funerary
weeping girl’, ‘merchant with beard like an abacus’.
Pristine and worn from the wonderful journey
they spoke of their fine minds, the excitement
of time travel, without moving a single stone muscle.
They did not fear the bazaar of generations
which milled at their feet and glanced up
shiftily from age to age. Who could bear them?
Not us. Not anymore. With their high
mindedness, their competence, their curled,
cropped hair. We cropped them. Down
they came, the many into the one into
the rubble, because at heart
they are stone.

(first published in PN Review 236, vol 43, no.6, 2017)