WHO’S HOME, WHO’S HISTORY?

Wavelets lapping on fallen
Corinthian columns tell
Of empires lost, of flaunted
Pride brought low: for here
Stood ancient Side (See-Day) port
And Roman bastion, high-walled
Against a deeper, hidden fear.

But of this fallen column,
What is known? Glistening in
The umbral early evening
Light, what secrets does it
Long to tell? Of him who,
Slave-lashed, hewed it from
Its distant marble home?
Of them who dragged it, mile
On mile, with many falling by
The way, with only sun-baked dust
To honour as their epitaph?

Of them, to praise some secretly
Derided Caesar, who carved it
To an elegance where beauty
Got the better of defiance? Or indeed of
Those who hauled it then aloft, a column
Stately in its honour of Apollon,
God of the higher arts, and of the Sun?

But later, then, the anger
Burns and boils: insurrection,
The scuttling of the fleet,
The sacking of the city and
Its holy, self-aggrandising
Pantheon: the answer to the
Hubris of the gods.

So how do I remember,
How re-learn, the history
Of the classics? For this is Asia
Minor, home of the dead -
Of empires come and gone;
Strange home too, and
Stranger grand-parental rooting,
To one of countless fallen soldiers
Wasted on Gallipoli’s barren,
Blackened, shrapnel-tortured earth.

Home of another kind, to the living
Daughters and sons of Ataturk, a
Nation caught between her neighbours –
Greece, Syria, Iraq, Iran (and troubled
Kurdistan): her peoples holding faith and
Ambiguity beneath the azure beauty of
This sky and sea – as I with them add
One more tear of loss, and hope
Amidst this middle-earthen
Cradle of the world.

On holiday in Side,
Anatolyan Pamphilia,
Turkey:
September 2011