The softness of the colours struck him
Barely a moment before the arrow…….
His last thoughts were not of home;
Not of glory,
Not of family,
Not of she:
She who had stitched leather,
Layer on layer,
In love,
In hope,
In hope against hope against harm
Across his breast and brow;
No, not even she;
But the colours,
The colours,
Colours living a double-pebble life:
Breathing – exhaling;
Darkening – lightening.
Colours wet:
Stark and striking,
Shifting with each gentle swash
Of the waves at the shore.
Colours dry:
Paling into pastel shades,
Settling still as the waters retreated
Before the feet of their landward foe.
Today men would meet on this margin,
Would mirror the war of these worlds,
Might against main:
Sea – land;
Zeus – Poseidon;
Death – life;
Persian – Athenian.
No god could claim complete victory
And vanquish one brother or another,
Could ever cut eternity’s cord
And consign a sibling rival
To time, to history, to memory;
For they were, ARE, all
Forever shackled to a present tense
Whose chains not even the immortal may loose.
Gods who may never win
Must only ever lose,
And,
Bored to a death that won’t take them,
Be condemned to play out
Their vacuous and thinly-veiled self-delusions
Of a glory that for them can never be,
Upon a mortal stage,
Whispering their whims,
Their puppeteer prompts and prophecies,
Into the vain ears of human hearts and dreams.
He had come,
Riding high on this hope
And a rising tide of Persian expectation
With security in his deities’ invincibility.
Fair wind and weather had found and filled their sails,
Driven and drawn them inexorably
To their destiny,
Their destination:
Marathon.
There would lie victory:
Ripe fruit for the plucking;
There lay their glory:
Nothing more than easy picking.
He couldn’t wait.
Wouldn’t wait;
[For glory is seldom shared and diminished divided],
Set his foot, flexed to spring, to the prow
As it sank its snarl, keel-deep, into the flesh of Greece,
And sprang,
Unleashing all his coiled fear and fury like Fire
Into the third of the Four Elements.
Then, in that slowest of split seconds,
The colours cut through his war-hardened carapace
Like jewels,
Like the spoils
He would never now see
About her neck,
Adorn her breast,
As the arrowpoint
Stole his sight
And sliced him
Soul from spirit.
Riven of its kernel,
The husk of him sailed on
In the winnowing breeze of battle,
Then beached itself,
As heavy and empty as the hollow promises
Of small gods and great men.
And the colours turned and ran
Crimson,
[As would three thousand Persians]
Over what was once him.
On Marathon beach
My eye was taken too…
… For every other colour,
There are crimson pebbles: two.
