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Calm languid sea on every side
the air as though resting above
one fishing boat
sails out of the gulf
leaving a long, subtle wake.
*
and then nothing
the same etc sleep
*
at night a boat came in
battered, sails gone
from another world by the looks,
the Ariel
two men and a boy
*
They came ashore next morning and greeted Kapetanios Christeas.
They are a Shelley poet, Cpt Williams and a boy Vivian,
the Shelley recites Sophocles and revolution very excited,
we have it here already, saying life of triumph and something after a big storm.
The Shelley jumps about like a boy,
Christeas looks at him puzzled
in the great morning of the world
*
He read Hellas to us, we sat around the tower,
he looks at us and says the final chorus was right,
the rest was bluster rhetoric with something about our fig tree
– which was not his to give for it anyway.
Christeas liked the fighting parts
and made the shouts of victory victory.
The Shelley dug his hands into the red soil
and held the white rocks in the shade of mimosa,
he looks at the sea everyday and will not leave.
The Shelley in earth twisting and turning,
came out from under that language
unblinking to get it right.