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Byzantium

I come not from

But from another time and place

Whose race is simple, tried and true;

As boy

I dropped me forth in Illinois,

A name with neither love nor grace

Was Waukegan. There I came from

And not, good friends, Byzantium.

And yet in looking back I see

From topmost part of farthest tree

A land as bright, beloved and blue

As any Yeats found to be true.

The house I lived in, hewn of gold

And on the highest market sold

Was dandelion-minted, made

By spendthrift bees in bee-loud glade.

And then of course our finest wine

Came forth from that same dandelion,

While dandelion was my hair

As bright as all the summer air;

I dipped in rainbarrels for my eyes

And cherries stained my lips, my cries,

My shouts of purest exaltation:

Byzantium? No. That Indian nation

Which made of Indian girls and boys

Spelled forth itself as Illinois.

Yet all the Indian bees did hum:

Byzantium.

Byzantium.

So we grew up with mythic dead

To spoon upon midwestern bread

And spread old gods’ bright marmalade

To slake in peanut-butter shade.

Pretending there beneath our sky

That it was Aphrodite’s thigh;

Pretending, too, that Zeus was ours

And Thor fell down in thundershowers.

While by the porch-rail calm and bold

His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold

My grandfather a myth indeed

Did all of Plato supersede;

While Grandmama in rocking-chair

Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care,

Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright

To winter us on summer night.

And uncles gathered with their smokes

Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,

And aunts as wise as Delphic maids

Dispensed prophetic lemonades

To boys knelt there as acolytes

On Grecian porch on summer nights.

Then went to bed there to repent

The evils of the innocent

The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears

Said, through the nights and through the years

Not Illinois nor Waukegan

But blither sky and blither sun;

Though mediocre all our Fates

And Mayor not as bright as Yeats

Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?

Byzantium.

Byzantium.