I am the tyrant Ardiaius
who was flayed
and impaled on a gorse bush.
But my end was so precisely etched
by a wily champion
that it gained features of a beginning..
And my gaze is so fixed
on what man can do to his fellow-man
that the world will never escape me.
The thoughts swarming inside the helmet
find their way into the heads of the living.
(* ασπάλαθος = spiny broom. The Greek myth is recounted in Plato’s Republic and the death of Ardiaius is described in a poem by George Seferis ‘On Gorse’)
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