A Poem More than 2 Decades in the Making: On Argonautics

Those waves, we follow on till the dark Euxine roll'd

Upon the blue Symplegades ...

-----Lord Byron in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

A poem that has taken me over two decades to get right after multiple incarnations has been recently published in Contemporary Haibun Online issue 2.1 (edited by Peter Newton). The poem, "On Argonautics", is based on the clashing rocks scene of the Jason and the Argonauts myth in Apollonius' Argonautica. Just after the turn of the millennium, I stuffed a worn copy of John Freely and Hillary Sumner Boyd's Strolling Through Istanbul into my backpack, and made it out to Rumeli Feneri. Rumeli Feneri is the last village on the European shore of the Bosporus where it meets the merging waters of the Black Sea (The Euxine). I remember seeing what are said to be fragments of the clashing rocks anchored to a levy and covered in guano from seabirds. And from there one can just about make out the reef of corresponding fragments closer to the Asian shore. These are in the shadow of the daunting cliffs of Anadolu Feneri and are skirted today by freight ships and oil tankers. Ever since, I have occasionally revisited this juxtaposition between our world and the clashing rocks of myth, but mostly with floundering lines that never made it through those rocks unscathed. And speaking of rocks, I highly recommend Stephen Bailey's "Boulder" in the same issue. Bailey's poem, which closes with the verse: split apart / the river's flow / reunites...