Who were these magicians
parsing sheep liver
and making Greek
their own?

The wine, the olives,
the cuisine marking
a region for millennia;
a life of ease,
passing days by the sea—
can life be too good
to survive?

What monuments can preserve
a language lost to time?
Going and gone,
dead words erase
history, phrase by phrase,
letter by letter

Taking out a tower, the sun
reclaims its silent earth;
it feeds, it destroys, it maintains
nothing; burning
with invisible fire
the discs of hope, their memories,
once gold-set jewels of thought

To wake in absence, to walk
in silence—that remains
all to be seen