(a trifle)

He was a traveling scholar;
From Alexandria he came,
He’d family in Judea for
His uncle was a prefect there
And had a big Greek-fashioned house
With pretty girl-slaves, fruits
Depending in the forecourt from bright trees;
Grapes too and plenty wine,
Much quiet for the writing of his book
A commentary on the Republic,
And in his spare time, poems,
Poems filled with arguments
About the natures of dryads, hamadryads,
And how the dew that fell upon the lap
Of Danae filled her with a child.
There was a feast that weekend to be had
Among the Jews; Passover he’d heard it called.

Friday there was a storm. He was sitting
Up in the attic tapping measures to himself
While an orange candle disformed into a pyramid
Of wax upon his table. Almost a week gone past
He’d seen those Jews all welcoming their king
Into the city with palm-fronds, although the latter rode an ass.
He must have come, their king, to celebrate the feast.

He worked all through the night and following day
Now purpling his eye-stars with too great exertion in
Reading grey prolix commentaries on
Divine Plato
Such as he also wrote:
He then came to a passage in his own still-laboured work
On the impassibility of the divine.
Wind shook the windows, rain. His favorite girl-slave
Came to distract him for an hour.
He took his pen again, thinking
Of Danea in her prison cell and how
That golden rain did fall,
And Zeus himself encrypt therein.
It was about the sixth hour.
He heard great shouts outside the city walls.
Being distracted thus, he called down for a bath.

Two days later, a whole poem came to him
Already robed in perfect lines; and when
He wrote them down the ink was green,
The paper smelled just like a rose.
He opened up his other work and came
To that same passage as before: the one
On the impassibility of the divine;
But now those lines were changed
Into a script of feathered gold and said:
God died outside the city walls
Two days ago,
And brought to pass the hopes of all,
The dreams of Plato the divine.