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In Arcadia

Tomorrow we’ll boil acorns instead of cabbage

to treat our hangovers.

—Nikocharēs (Old Comedy playwright and poet, Athens, d. 345 BCE)


Upon the road from Megalopolis

—big city—in Arcadia, we paused

awhile at Mount Mainalo (depicted)

where anciently the good spirit

Agathodaimon was worshipped

by humble acorn eaters, who

—as a Delphic oracle'd predicted—

once stopped the macho Spartans

dead in their ferocious tracks.

 

But what of the daimon back

cover hovering in the blinding dark

that writes what seems to be poetry

—though all too often in phrases

so indistinct that I can barely see!

—does it actually, for real, exist [he, she?],

in some hyper "quantum" superconscious

cloud? I wonder . . . hung over yet again

by images off the Web, whose poignant

speech impinges on the heart

with its electronic hook or crook.


The only hangover cure there is, I fear,

is not from any online thing or book

or source in a bubbling Chinese spring:

it's boiling acorns, as Nikocharēs

recommended, when Hell's confounded demons sing.


Jing'an Temple and West Nanjing Road, formerly known as Bubbling

Spring Road, in Shanghai's International Settlement


 

Note: Aristotle says in his Poetics (ca. 335 BCE) that Nikocharēs wrote a parody of Homer's Iliad titled the Diliad, or Deiliad (Δειλιάς < δειλία: “cowardice”), now unfortunately lost.



Saturday, January 18, 2025

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Photo by Peter Dreyer

 Cyclops by Christos Saccopoulos, used by kind permission of the sculptor.

Copyright © 2023 - by Peter Dreyer

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