Upon living the peloponnese war

Living the peloponnese war, originally uploaded by M'sheArt2❤

Dicaeopolis

Be not surprised, most excellent spectators,

If I that am a beggar have presumed

To claim an audience upon public matters,

Even in a comedy; for comedy

Is conversant in all the rules of justice,

And can distinguish betwixt right and wrong.

The words I speak are bold, but just and true.

Cleon at least cannot accuse me now,

That I defame the city before strangers,

For this is the Lenaean festival,

And here we meet, all by ourselves alone;

No deputies are arrived as yet with tribute,

No strangers or allies: but here we sit

A chosen sample, clean as sifted corn,

With our own denizens as a kind of chaff.

First, I detest the Spartans most extremely;

And wish that Neptune, the Taenarian deity,

Would bury them in their houses with his earthquakes.

For I've had losses--losses, let me tell ye,

Like other people; vines cut down and injured.

But among friends (for only friends are here),

Why should we blame the Spartans for all this?

For people of ours, some people of our own,--

Some people from among us here, I mean:

But not the People (pray, remember that);

I never said the People, but a pack

Of paltry people, mere pretended citizens,

Base counterfeits,--went laying informations,

And making a confiscation of the jerkins

Imported here from Megara; pigs, moreover,

Pumpkins, and pecks of salt, and ropes of onions,

Were voted to be merchandise from Megara,

Denounced, and seized, and sold upon the spot.

Well, these might pass, as petty local matters.

But now, behold, some doughty drunken youths

Kidnap, and carry away from Megara,

The courtesan, Simaetha. Those of Megara,

In hot retaliation, seize a brace

Of equal strumpets, hurried forth perforce

From Dame Aspasia's house of recreation.

So this was the beginning of the war,

All over Greece, owing to these three strumpets.

For Pericles, like an Olympian Jove,

With all his thunder and his thunderbolts,

Began to storm and lighten dreadfully,

Alarming all the neighborhood of Greece;

And made decrees, drawn up like drinking songs,

In which it was enacted and concluded

That the Megarians should remain excluded

From every place where commerce was transacted,

With all their ware--like 'old Care' in the ballad:

And this decree, by land and sea, was valid.

Then the Megarians, being all half starved,

Desired the Spartans to desire of us

Just to repeal those laws: the laws I mentioned,

Occasioned by the stealing of those strumpets.

And so they begged and prayed us several times;

And we refused: and so they went to war.

(the fools)


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Brink Of Eternity

In desperate hope I go and search for her
in all the corners of my room;
I find her not.

My house is small
and what once has gone from it can never be regained.

But infinite is thy mansion, my lord,
and seeking her I have to come to thy door.

I stand under the golden canopy of thine evening sky
and I lift my eager eyes to thy face.

I have come to the brink of eternity from which nothing can vanish
---no hope, no happiness, no vision of a face seen through tears.

Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean,
plunge it into the deepest fullness.
Let me for once feel that l ost sweet touch 
in the allness of the universe.




Rabindranath Tagore