Dredging Byzantium (Themia’s Song)

by Thea Halo

From the noisy gutter of my heart
I dredge Byzantium
cleansed of her ancients
and their heirs.
Her temples turned to domes,
her domes to spires;
the slouching beast
living in the promised land.

Who chants your glory now
Byzantium?
Sumela a broken nest
of hollow eyes
left on mountain cliffs
for nebulous gazers.

Who heard Anatolia wail her grief?
Or came to cart her exiles
banished from their ancient shore?
Their own ships dry-docked
for three thousand years.

And when they stepped on foreign soil,
who came to welcome
those hapless mariners
from burning Smyrna?
from battered Troy?
Penelope no longer at her loom.

Or heard Pontos
screaming from the flames?
Twenty, times twenty, times twenty
miles of bloody, dragging feet;

babies and buzzards
strewn along the road;
death imbued
in every rock and stream.

No. That is no country
for old men.
for who can blind them
as they blind their young
these ninety ignoble years?

Now like sirens
gathered on this other shore,
Themia’s song upon our lips,
we sing your snuffed-out lore;

for three million Christian souls
in uneasy sleep
beneath your mountain ridges,
banks, and shores.

We sing of what is past,
and passing,
and what’s to come.

References to Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats
© Thea Halo, August 24, 2004.