Unto This Last

Odysseus and the sirens. Attic red-figure stamnos from Vulci, 480–470 BCE, in the British Museum, illustrating the episode in the Odyssey 12.61–62, 212–36: "let every ear / Be stopp'd against the song! 'tis death to hear!" (trans. Pope)

A sonnet composed after watching Jane Campion's Keats biopic "Bright Star"

Nothing ventured, nothing gained, the adage

Whispered by an old inmate of our cage,

We listen to the song that's "death to hear";

Keats' nightingale is surely somewhere here,

Singing its little heart out! O bright star,

Unlike false Cortez to whose eyes, afar,

The ocean heaved into view "in Darien,"

We gaze, not on the Pacific, but men,

Whose leavings rehearse the sirens' voices,

Their easeful life disguising fatal choices.

Surely there is still time to fix the mess!

Can't we back up a bit and reassess?

This "nothing" might yet be Nirvana's shore—

We live again lost loves and banish war??

But no. You should have thought of that before!

That was the last of it. There's no fucking more!

Friday, January 2, 2026