Two Poems

Pressing

‘…the word ‘starvation’, which to Latinists is a Barbarism…’

The Latinists huddle around
the candle-like indecision of a tiny flickering
black-and-white of television, the cutting-edge
of that which they will allow themselves
to be aware. They are amazed. It pictures
a monstrous data, a graphic

of the ruined Greek economy, which is tortured
to the point of importing olive oil. The Latinists
are appalled, their Doric minds importing
a dawning  horror like cheap, Germanic olive oil.
The T.V.’s tinny speakers bespeak the sound of their
carefully tended teleologies crashing down

into crude, barbarian eschatologies. The Latinists
are muted by the cutting edge of the new possibilities.