autumn

Letters from America

Wednesday 6 May 2020

This photo is a bit out of focus and overexposed but your glamorous aunt is doing real yoga.  There are some lovely spots just off the highway to Canberra.  This is one of them, at a rest area commemorating one of the bravest second war VCs, Diver Derrick VC.

In the Iliad there are one or two passages that changed the way I looked at poplars. Everyone knows I love trees. I already loved poplars. But now I love them even more. I have included one of the passages from Homer, which is about the death of a Trojan named Simoeisios. It follows a standard formula: the fall of the warrior in the battle, his precise wound, the story of his humanity, the metaphor.

There Telamonian Ajax
struck down the son of
Anthemion
Simoeisios in his stripling’s
beauty, whom once his
mother
descending from Ida bore
beside the banks of
Simoeis
when she had followed her
father and mother to tend
the sheepflocks.
Therefore they called him
Simoeisios; but he could
not
render again the care of his
dear parents; he was
short-lived,
beaten down beneath the
spear of high-hearted
Ajax,
who struck him as he first
came forward beside the
nipple
of the right breast, and the
bronze spearhead drove
clean through the
shoulder.
He dropped then to the
ground in the dust, like
some black poplar,
which in the land low-lying
about a great marsh grows
smooth trimmed yet with
branches growing at the
uttermost tree-top:
one whom a man, a maker
of chariots, fells with the
shining
iron, to bend into a wheel
for a fine-wrought chariot,
and the tree lies hardening
by the banks of a river.
Such was Anthemion’s son
Simoeisios, whom
illustrious
Ajax killed.

4.473 – 489

xx from MG