Gary LeBel
Hearing It I Go Out on the Porch
"Finest of all things I leave
Is sunlight, then stars and the moon’s bright face,
And cucumbers in season and apples, too,
And sweet pears"
This fragment of a poem written by Praxilla of Sicyon, a fifth-century Greek, has always impressed me with its directness and simplicity. Later scholiasts belittled her for daring to suggest that Adonis would value such things as vegetables and fruits.
Today as its soft, sonorous presence encloses the house, I go out on the porch for the clean, earthen smells borne by whatever it moistens, whatever it quells, whatever it touches:
to the poet’s “scandalous” list, I add “rain.”
In a tangle of tall sweetgums
the one tulip poplar
highest
Note: σικυών, or “sikyón,” means “cucumber bed.”
About the Author
Gary LeBel is an artist-poet living in the greater Atlanta area whose poems have appeared in journals throughout the USA, the UK, Japan, and India. He believes that art, or anything else worth doing, is a life-long pilgrimage.
This is such admirable work and very smooth and you make it look all so easy. I have the Greek anthology at home and the first page I flipped to was Praxilla’s poem. Such synchronicity!
Thanks for sharing Praxilla’s poem, Gary.
And nice way of working with it. I very much like pieces that have allusions to poets of the distant past.
Ray
And thank you, Ray. That’s the thing with the ancient Greeks and why I read them over and over, as a bridge to the classical past and to learn how they do “that thing they do”.
Thank you so much, Dru. And the relatively modern Greeks are wonderful as well, Odysseus Elytis, George Seferis, Angelos Sikelianos, CP Cavafy and the list goes on and on. I read and enjoy them and the ancients continually. Have a fine new year!