The Seeker Sought – poetry

By Rory Brennan

Fiat Justitia ruat caelum

The searcher is pursued, the seeker sought.
Why’s he hightailing it? What state secret does he know?
Can the sky fall (vide Roman law) if he is caught?
A Cyclopean moon casts light like napalm snow,

freeze-frames the landscape into the Western Front.
He dodges but is shadowed by a luminescent owl
whose amoral plot may be to mastermind the hunt.
Let him make off, be trapped, that bird will prevail.

The escapee like Diogenes grips a small torch.
It throws a wan white saucer on the ground,
enough to find the vital insight that’s been lost,

so skill in art or a scintilla of value may be found.
Beneath clouds that menace like a brimstone arch
he runs for it, love clutched like a nugget in his fist.

 

*The Threshing Circles (aloni) is from a series of poems about Paros, entitled, Ten Sketches from a Greek Terrace, from his collection, The Walking Wounded (Daedalus)