by Bex Hainsworth
We approach the Agoraios Kolonos hill
flanked by statues of Poseidon. Time
has rendered them limbless, yet each scale
of their tails remains, a golden island
archipelago, with grooves of ribs like gills.
The Hephesteum crouches amongst laurel
and myrtle and pomegranate, seeming
almost bashful about its bulk. A short climb
and we are beneath a frieze of centaurs
and Lapiths: it is supposed to be a battle,
but their bodies are leaning together,
legs intertwined, like a dance, like worship.
This is a shrine for the god of making things,
and we feel a reverence for creation as we follow
its edges, fingers sliding along the sandy rope.
It is the most intact temple of its kind.
A forest of ridged columns forms rectangles
of blue sky, between stone beams sunlight
spills like hammered gold into space
and silence. Everything is a doorway.
::
Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Wales, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, Nimrod, and The Rialto. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by The Black Cat Poetry Press.
Image: Shpëtim Ujkani
ID: Temple of Hephaestus in Athens, Greece.
Psaltery & Lyre 