A.R. McHugh was born in Scotland and came to Australia in 1995. She did a PhD at the University of Sydney, and a DPhil and post-doctoral fellowship at Oxford. She returned to Sydney and was an unsuccessful school teacher. She is now a successful dog-walker.
Giorgious wears the dust of Propylaia like a robe
and sleeps on a bed of tumbled sandstone
beyond the tourists’ cordon.
Master of his own morals, he has slept
with all the Karyatids
and frequently copulates with Sofia
in Erechthion’s sanctuary.
He eschews the demos for the polis,
for he is its ward and warden;
old women propitiate him, and in return
he advises on the marriage of their daughters
the businesses of their sons,
their murmurs beneath the blue sky of Greece.
For a handful of olives with the purple pits removed
Giorgious hears the confession of workmen
and grandmothers with discretion,
and yawns, lordly, flexing sleek and politic.
He accepts his cousins who mooch and snooze
beneath the blue shutters
of white-washed Anafiori;
but as for himself, he and his league
need only the merciless sun above Akropolis
and the cold and massy glory of Nike’s house,
and an eternal watch over wide-armed Piraeus, far south.
He walks in the sunlit agora
quietly, among its sleeping green places
where pomegranates were once sold
and some Jew preached on the slippery rock above the market.
Giorgious has heard of Israel, vaguely,
under the thumb of Rome, like the Greeks.
They lost an unkempt messiah, detested
by his own flea-bitten people.
Lost to Greece was Archimedes
drawing in the sand when the sword cut him down.
Unkillable, Giorgious’ league bears sun and shade
and history’s vast, slow-beating wings
to sit sentry on the museum wall, watching
time pass, tourists come, history go
and the white sun pacify the dusty mass of wide Athens.
Poetry in this post: © A.R. McHugh
Published with the permission of A.R. McHugh