GUESTS OF LIFE

‘We are the guests of life.’ Martin Heidegger

 ‘In ancient Greek the word for ‘guest’ is the same as the word for ‘foreigner’: xenos. And if you were to ask me to define our tragic condition, it’s that the word ‘xenophobia’ survives, and is commonly used, everyone understands it; but the word ‘xenophilia’ has disappeared…’ George Steiner

 

For Cicero books were the ‘soul of the house’.

The Ancient Romans knew a thing or two

about staying safe in uncivil times.

Nevertheless on his way to sail abroad

the lawyer, statesman, writer, orator

polymath was assassinated

by Roman soldiers obeying the orders

of a vindictive kleptocracy. His head

and his hands were nailed up in The Forum.

Each autumn an affliction of starlings

would swoop above Rome like a chattering net.

Now in the abandoned Coliseum

there are only cats, and the shadows of cats.

 

I watch a neighbour’s cat  – obviously

well fed at home, sleek, sharp-eyed – practising

its instinctive hunting skills in our garden.

Its belly to the ground, it pads forward,

inch by silent inch, then leaps on its prey –

a peacock butterfly opening its wings.

Shocked I almost cry out – but what should

cats know about the absence of butterflies,

or butterflies about the instincts of cats?

But we do – who will risk death to nurse strangers,

and who will slaughter others in a moment.

 

There is no one available now to wind

the parish church clock, whose bells chimed

the quarters and the hours through world wars,

whose hands moved implacably. I can glimpse

the steeple, as I walk the hundred paces

along our garden paths, over the lawns,

across the terraces – where my lovely ghosts

jostle at each turn. I think of house arrest,

self-exile – Ovid, Galileo, the Franks –

note the laburnum’s yellow ringlets

loud with bees, and the wisteria’s sweet

sensuous perfume, the blackbirds nesting

in the ivy, magpies in the snowy drifts

of the pear tree, and consider myself

blessed, if there were blessings to be doled,

having people to love who are living.

 

 

 

Ancient RomansAnne FrankCiceroCovid 19GalileoGeorge SteinerlockdownMartin HeideggerOvidpeacock butterflyRomeThe Forum