Flying to Byzantium

 

 

Yeats' Byzantium where
tired old men flee

is a city in itself exhausted,

replenished many times over.
Still it is mecca for the

emptied and drained
seeking to dip in a gyre

into some cleansing pool,

for some staled verses

to be re-shined like .

Certainly not from a Hagia Sophia,

cathedral turned mosque turned
museum for public viewing,

nor from its previous panellings,
ripped away by plunderings
and violences of history,

its sweating marble columns

bursting into the apse

like flowers in a kaleidoscope.

Not by the plastering of
cruciforms and mosaic walls

and the spreading of gold leaf

over layers of glass tesserae

and finished with splurges

of paste . . . not this but
from a mystic hovering

untouched by movements

and seasons, ineffable and wisplike,

misty-eyed memory of some

dusky islands rife with enchantment
vanishing into the Marmara Sea.

   And  fleeing into Istanbul

is seeking out sites

for ruined dreams to sit on

long after golden birds

on golden boughs

have run out of songs.

 

 

 

 

by Ophelia A. Dimalanta