Classics

Students know the name of Oedipus,

Know his disaster, where it grinds

The lanterns, sparkling, of his grecian flesh.

The classroom shines; each mother's son

Made helpless by the dazzle, shades his eyes -

He has an inkling he has seen Jocasta perish.

The mother's daughters of another mind

And mood are harder eyed, receive the shock

Of distant gods and their perverse exactions,

Guard their brothers from the eidolon,

The size implaccable of tense priapus.

None evolves a word, turn Christian faces

Twisted for an instant in a strange king's rages

To an embattled calm. The classroom waits

The passage of an hour and twenty pages

When their instructor to a saner climate shifts

And to a better god. Once free of Greeks

Light warms them from a burning bush. They find

Themselves inside a text whose landscape shows

The fulgurations and the brimstone traces

Of luminous, abominable Hebrew places.