He always knew I watched him.
I made no secret of it.
A child obsessed with ancient gods I chose him.
Did he choose me or I choose him?
I neither know nor care.
A bargain had been struck,
Just as his foot struck the earth
before he took to flight
and where he went, I followed
inspired by happiness or sorrow.
I don’t know why I write this now
It isn’t me who holds the pen.
Now my youth is gone
He compels me in the task
Of speaking truth to men.
My tutor made a cast of my foot sealed all the way up to my ankle
It was a demonstration of how it should be done
My foot became uncomfortably hot under enveloping plaster
And my arch was slightly flattened under the pressure.
When he cut the mould away it was a relief.
Fifty years later I wonder if my youthful foot still exists
Locked away in the dark of an art college cupboard
Hidden with still life props.
I wish he had posed me on tiptoe like Hermes in the Louvre
Or Peter Pan in the park always ready for flight.
Hermes Drift
a miraculous form wrapped in feathers
closing the eyes of the day
opens his own eyes wide
Athena’s child
flashes through beams of moonlight
his wing curves create an all-knowing smile in the cleft of night
how swift he is in bringing death
to the thoughtless feasting of earth
a confusion of eyes look upward
through milk-merged, mist-soaked, fur-fleeting air
he falls, tearing the skin of the firmament with his sudden cry
the river floats on by
filling the veins and arteries that lead to the vastness of oceans
where Neptune’s hair shelters the young, as yet unformed, children of gentle Salacia’s sighs
the right hand of Zeus slices the wind and the rain
above the sea-salt beds
where two brothers will never be parted
bound as they are by a miracle unsurpassed
essential to every life
silver-backed fish shoal, slip-witted and swift
driven by beautiful Hermes in a trick of the gods
and mercurial wisdom switches this way and that
in an image painted with fishtails
showing us moving atoms unseen by a naked eye
And what is longing, what is hiraeth, what is yearning
but a sense of old displacements
from banks of shifting sand?
It’s the magnetic current
spawned in our deepest wishes
that persistently calls us home on elusive tides.
© A.Chakir 2023
The Dreaming Path 