Strategikon

Their marginalia impinge over the moonlight's scroll,
the men and exoskeletons discarded on the plain:
here's John Doukas smiling on the evening's prospect
where the axe has bared his sympathetic teeth,
here Constantine Diogenes disputes an arrow's logic,
the larvae's rhetoric embellishing his throat,
and there Botaniates lays his Damask to the earth
as tenderly as he laid out his groves in Epirus.
Guiscard here, and Bohemond his son repose
in hauberks as they did at home, and here too dogs
and falcons flock over their outstretched limbs:
here many hands extend on Anatolia's page,
twitching in histories of dust, here eyes and tongues
are fixed in praise for dynasties of ants.

MEIRION JORDAN
TLS March 2, 2007

 

 

 

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