Thursday 18 August 2011

Biography poem

From mourning to biography
From kings to saints.
In Themistocles and Camillus
Plutarch wrote 'the year after
Plague came as a tourist to Rome,
stole away an incalculable number
of ordinary citizens, and
made slaves of them. Most
of the magistrates too.
Also: Camillus.' Death
ties the hands and leads away
the common and the mighty, both
to cropped-hair servitude.
Camillus gets the only write-up.
Which means: only he is really dead.
The one and only slave.

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