Low now is the sun in the west,
Bruised and cracked, the sky and mast.
Lost are all the songs, and dead
And gone, the men who sang them last.

Here the brutish ship hulls swayed,
Colossal through the navy night,
Lashed and moored, and creaking, weighed
The sable waters on the bight.

There up the hoary river toward
The site where then, a village lay,
Chimney smoke fell on the ford
And travelers from far away

Swung their hats and sang their woes,
Calluses on ev’ry hand
And all around them, endless groves
Of yew and ash safekept the land.

Those selfsame trees which now are gone,
By edict taken for the port
That furnished temples, posts and yon
Did bless the lads at Agincourt.

High hill atop that lonely stead;
Behold the proud, forgotten down
That like a shadowed, thoughtful head
Once donned the dawn sun like a crown.

Yet evening veils that hedged mound
Above the fastness and the gloom;
A blackened fell of upcast ground
That ere was holy, whole, and strewn

With habergeons of ruddy gold,
And jewels, and brittle warworn maille;
With epitaphs that boldly told
Of lips that touched the holy graille.

Alas grown over, underfoot,
Sad sedges hide from strict regard
The bloodwashed mud, and ancient soot,
And crow-picked bones from searching bards.

And although time, and time again
When spring at last was all a-flower,
Up the hill traipsed highland men
To turn those graves to blooming bowers.

Now it seems but one will go.
Odd, the thought, how impolite;
To part the company of those
In town who’ve long since feared to die.

Courtiers-of-the-new, for hire;
Mercantile proclivities
Disparage verse, and brush, and lyre,
All on account of quantity.

Their forbears long laid low beneath
Not spear, nor sword, nor heel, nor bolt,
But put from mind, left on that heath
To fade, by metropolitan folk.

From there to here comes such-a-one;
Hypocrite, türmer, fool, pariah,
To remake what was made undone,
Or, failing that, to raise his pyre.

In either case, his lantern plods;
A will o’ wisp among the trees.
Guilty, then, before both gods
And figures in the temple frieze.

Some winding path, at length, he spies,
Twisting from the foothills, on
And up the barrow, blackbirds cry
From grasping boughs, and shrouding fronds.

Round the earthwork tomb to walk,
The roots of which are iron, and coal,
And bone, where only starlight stalks
Labyrinthian as the Nietzschean soul.

The wood releases windswept leas
And like a standing stone of old,
Upright, one could seem to be
To onlookers, inscrutable.

Abandoned by the waning moon,
Surmounting thus, the temple height;
The precinct, wherefrom thundered doom,
Now kept by meager lantern light.

Poliphilo absent sleep
Within some edifice, now riven,
Sleeplessness prevents the dream
Of Polia, to whom he’s given.

The impetus now lost on him;
Some foreign tongue, the midnight hour,
The rationale for why those men
Atop their dead had raised their tower.

A sextant on the sward there strides,
Stone to stone, and soul to soul
And by his feeble glow he finds
It all but indecipherable.

Alexander J. Ford is an American author and architectural designer. His scholarly writing has appeared in numerous publications, and his architectural drawings were anthologized by the Princeton Architectural Press’s 2019 volume Single-Handedly. For several years, Ford served the archaeological excavation at the Sanctuary of Lykaian Zeus in the central Peloponnesus as the Assistant Field Director for Architecture. He has lectured at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, and taught a design studio at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture.