Three Byzantine Poms (2000), Newly Published
Related note: on 8 October 2023, one of my new poems, “No Second Photius,” was accepted for Last Stanza Poetry Journal’s issue 14, available in paperback, hardcover and Kindle. The issue brings together poems from 100 different poets.
About the Below Poems
On 14 August 2023, I published three Byzanine-themed poems here, on the Mediterranean Poetry website, based in Sweden, a publication which enjoys contributors from around the world.
Although written in 2000, these poems were published for the4 first time on that website, and are reporuduced below in this article. I will prove some brief context on their composition and themes.
These historical poems include ‘Manuel Consults with the Astrologers,’ (about Emperor Manuel Komnenos, and his failed campaign to retake Italy); “Manuel II at Twilight” (taking place late in the life of 15th-century Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos); and “Sphrantzes in the Tower” (about a historical episode in which the diplomat George Sphrantzes was kidnapped in the Peloponnese and extricated himself from his tower prison).
All of these poems were written following my MPhil in Byzantine Studies at Oxford, during a period of great reflection and creativity, while living on the island of Crete in the year 2000.
So, without further ado, here you go. i hope you enjoy these old classics.
Three Byzantine Poems
Manuel Consults with the Astrologers
Year of composition: 2000
Disaster: Italy could not be retaken.
Justinian’s empire can no longer be dreamt,
but the failure at least was magnificent.
The battered galleys of the Romans abandon
the west, where on the sinking sun gazes
an unfazed emperor.
Approaching Dyrrachium, the meaningless stars
meander, gleam, lazily glow
though the distant lights of the harbor make
irrelevant the craft of the navigator; he retires.
Murderous, clutching sacks of concave silver
the mercenaries disperse, scatter in the port’s dark
and back to their various homelands, or wherever
fortune will take them next. The rest
sullen set course for the capital.
At long last, Constantinople; acclamations resound, but anxiety, lest
accusations be aspected against those who planned it,
at strategists, tacticians, enthusiasts but
they need not repent; there will be no gouging today.
For the court must not be neglected;
Manuel’s entourage in entertainment delights.
Orchestrated merriment, the complements of charlatans
their banter endured, and court-songs, ornate
commingle, disperse on the Golden Horn.
The emperor is magnanimous, gives all a hearing
all encomiasts, annalists, metaphysicians
all who yearn for freedom from
the measureless slavery of the mortal scribe.
Outside, the hallways with murmurings swell;
has Manuel at last lost the favor of God? How else
can be explained the latest catastrophe? Inside
the revelry continues. At last!
The astrologers are announced.
Resplendent, the emperor receives them
from high smooth throne blazing
with ruby eyes of ivory
peacocks; the demonstrations begin.
Unlabored fingers uncover the astrolabe,
while carefully calfskin pages are flipped
in manuscripts ancient and tortured with symbols,
Greek numbers, Arab markings and spheres,
hemispheres and diagrams, scholia on Ptolemy.
Manuel is fascinated: the future holds much.
Discreetly, he does not inquire about
the Italian disaster, how that was not seen,
but presses ahead with exuberance to
the next great Roman conquest, disregards the rest;
for even the fixed stars will learn
to venerate a sun-king such as he.
Manuel II at Twilight
Year of composition: 2000
The door slams; it is dusk. The emperor
turns to Sphrantzes. ‘My son has
great aspirations, great ambitions; but
these are no longer our times. The
empire demands a caretaker.’
The courtier nods. The emperor gazes
at the soft light of the city, and beyond
at the stealthy mountains of Asia Minor,
shadowed and sunken in darkness, lost.
It has been dying for so many years he can’t
even feel it slip; but it will not die with them.
He has made his penitence to God, and the
monastery alone awaits. He remembers
what happened to Bayezid, where impudence leads
and the treachery of John, his own nephew, who
would have usurped
the pitiful corpse of dwindled Byzantium
had it not been for their merciful God.
In silence, Manuel prays.
And then for his own son, a different John
and his eager frustration
to get the war done with, but Manuel
cannot be too harsh – for he too
was impetuous once – ah, but
there was still hope then! When
he’d journeyed to England, even after Nikopolis
it still seemed the West could rise up,
literature sustained the emperor’s dreams;
he took shelter in the pen, and the wit of Kydones.
But Kydones is dead these twenty-four years.
The wind from the Bosporus rattles the pane; an
oil-lamp and manuscript await.
For tonight, again
an emperor still
Manuel will take solace in literature.
Sphrantzes in the Tower
Year of Composition: 2000
Bitter, he traces a shape in the dirt,
a shape which he cannot see; from somewhere
in the darkness drips water. Insects and scurrying rodents erase
other shapes, the displeasures of other days.
He retraces the domes of the Chora.
A slab of rough bread, rock-hard, is flung
in through the bars of the tower. He fights
with the rats for it; his stomach can’t imagine it;
Sphrantzes longs for Byzantium, where
he’d be dining on pheasants and wine in the palace,
on sweet berries in Blachernae, and Black Sea fish!
Ah, miserable, mutable fortune! Cursing, he
scatters the dust, dissolving the domes of the Chora.
Pacing the tower, his round-plastered cell
Sphrantzes thinks back to that black day of
ambush, kicks dust-heaps, growls and how,
how had the rough-toned Italians not known
that he was ambassador, prime minister please!
They’d tossed him around like a barley sack
and now, thirty days dirty and gaunt,
beard-grizzled like some grazing monk!
He gasps; signs; contrition. On bended knees
Sphrantzes begs of the God he’s offended
whose works are precise, inscrutable, just
he must learn humility – he prostrates himself –
his toes so swollen from kicking the wall
the wall which has crumbled at one edge,
and Sphrantzes praises God for His mercy,
and feels in the dark for a stone,
a sharp one to scrape with.