Above the city, thinner than the smog,
invisible, are energies of liberated souls
who once dwelt here in flesh: Socrates
and Plato, Aspasia and her Pericles,
philosophers and hetaerae, artisans and slaves:
now they all float free of matter, yet they
recognise this place, and gravitate
towards it still, never quite at home
in space, preferring hollows in the hill
renowned as the Acropolis, or niches
in the temple they knew also as the Parthenon -
stripped to the bone, ethereal in rain,
a ghostly apparition of itself, considered
visually, but to the spirit an abiding force.