The Descent of Europe

Today (9 May 2024) is Europe Day. I’m prompted to repost this poem of mine about the long cultural history of our continent.

The original post from 2018:

Here is the poem of mine published by Magma in their Europe Issue on 6 April. ‘Descent’ as in evolution and Darwin’s ‘Descent of Man’.

 

The Descent of Europe
After WB Yeats’ ‘Long-Legged Fly’

Let us listen – as Lydia is doing,
here in northern Greece, here in the shade
where a clear stream runs whispering over the stones.
She is listening to Paul, this weather-beaten traveller
from the shores of Asia. Such upright bearing though.
Clean hands. Piercing eyes. Clearly an educated man
and his thoughts sink as easily into her mind
as rain into long-parched land.

    Like a chick heard tapping within the egg
a new age stirs to break free.

Or listen to a group, in doublet and lace,
standing in the sun on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.
Well mannered, they greet and chat or mentally rehearse
(again) their studied orations. They are waiting
the arrival of Petrarch. With his ink-discoloured fingers
and his tired eyes, he has laboured to bring
out of the dust the incisive minds of the past.
Their reasoning. Their argument. Their courage.

   Like a chick heard tapping within the egg
a new age stirs to break free.

And listen if you will to the iron wheels
grinding the cobbles of a cathedral city on the Baltic;
cries of the harbour and of the gulls, raucous, overhead.
Copernicus goes walking here, fur collar against the wind.
His mind is full of the silent motions of the planets,
their paths across the sky, their advances and retreats.
Indifferent to the crowds bustling about him, he’s lost
in the computations on which his thesis rests.

    Like a chick heard tapping within the egg
a new age stirs to break free.

 

 © John Looker 2018

Back to 2024 now:

Magma’s website is at https://magmapoetry.com/   . It was a very popular issue – such a variety of strong poems, from established poets as well as newcomers like me – well worth getting a copy for your shelves if you can.

A second poem celebrating Europe was published a year later in Poetry Salzburg Review, posted here at https://johnlooker.wordpress.com/2019/09/29/serenade-for-europe/

And how Brexit still hurts, that profound historic misjudgment!