The Winds of Wonder

Once I looked into the Mirror of Elea

Once I looked into the mirror of Elea and met Parmenides,

But the One Thing that seemed to be still raced in paradoxes;

Protagoras gave to the City of Thurii a perfect code of law,

Then reaching beyond reason a mind knew what he never saw;

Pythagoras surely had a thigh of gold and wouldn’t eat beans,

However, he worked out a formula of the Harmonic Means;

Thales of Miletus ran down the stream in search of its source,

And then found the earth to be flat like a petri-dish, of course;

Anaximander always kept a curious substance in his pocket,

But as he had no money took silver-browed fish to the market;

Anaxagoras thought that the sun is but a huge white hot stone,

And, as it whirled, like raindrops countless worlds were born;

Democritus on the shore made a lucky guess about the atom,

Although wanderers of the gleaming region hadn’t yet come;

It was a new mathematics of the idea-force that held the clue,

For in that geometric element many granules and holes grew;

Poor Archimedes weighed the famed crown in a bucket of water,

But when the Black Whim rode the soldier’s Ass did he falter;

Heraclitus stepped again into the strange Becoming because,

Indeed, in gush of curveless eternity never was there a pause;

Phidias took the gods to his shady workshop in the backyard,

And in the eyes of Death the living fires of Time appeared;

Homer saw flames of Troy rising from the pyre of Patroclus,

It was epochal beginning of clatter of the hooves of Eohippus.

27.10.1982

The clatter of hooves:

Polla d’ananta katanta paranta te dochmia t’elthon — Iliad

… and before them went the mules; And ever upward, downward, sideward and aslant they fared. Translated by AT Murray