Athens
Spirits of air personified -
youths whose cheeks balloon
with breeze, girls gracile
birds, with wings of hair,
prefigure spring's awakening.
Musicians with their lips
to pipes, the double flute,
the reed, the lyre, form a frieze -
exalted, carefree ariels
in headlong flight.
The street that skirts the octagon -
Aeolus - shepherds lambs of cloud,
strayed from April's airborne flock
grazing on Athena's rock.
The tower housed a water-clock,
a klepsydra that marked the hours'
ebb and flow through aqueducts
from wells on the Acropolis.
And so the elements conspired -
stone and water, time and tide
encircled by aeolic beings,
untrammelled as their names implied.
Dervishes would gather there,
spiralling toward their trance,
emulating breath of heaven
in their transcendental dance.
The palimpsest made by our feet
on paths as intimate as bone
traced a ring about those stones,
bleached by moonbeams, laved in sun,
the walls at Easter softened by rose
froth of Judas trees in bloom.
Enfolding stillness at its core,
inspired by impulses of air,
kinesis of the atmosphere,
the tower weathers centuries.