I S S U E 2

Lucy Crispin

wormholes and paradox

The Archaeological Museum of Chania welcomes the Gods of Aptera
museum poster, summer 2019

These stick figures, metal dulled brown,
are caught in clumsy beautiful port de bras,
left arms hooped out at chest height,
right hands lifted to the forehead: venerating.
Simplicity transfigured by honesty
they ask, out across four thousand years,
the usual questions: how should we live?
what matters? is there any help out there?

In another case, Roman mourners sit in stone,
old women spread with age, sheathed in scarves,
toes peeping out from beneath their skirts.
Their eyes are cast down, faces serious,
not sad; they are simply looking at the facts.
You can see that their hands clutch closed
their shawls from the inside; that they have sat
patiently, and long. Displayed nearby,
three flattened ovals of wire, thick with verdigris
and time—one end sharpened, the other
folded back on itself to receive the point—
are instantly recognisable: nappy pins.
Connection bolts, earths at my heart.

I sit at the museum’s door, looking out
over the bleaching, sun-shocked garden.
Beyond it, the noon hour café hum, the roar
and jostle of the street; within, broken-off columns
stand in grass; a stone fragment of lion;
a mantle; our lunchbox, sitting on a Roman plinth.
Behind, a step away in the dim cool quiet,
this assemblage of wormholes and paradox:
how tiny we are, and how large;
how our lives mean everything and nothing at all;
how these things have always been true.

Gleaming in the gloom, Apollo and Artemis
are marble sleek, aloof and beautiful.
In a chair at their feet a teenager sits silent,
absorbed in her phone; not yet on the lookout
for gods to welcome. I reach for a sandwich
and notice the still-bright browns of a young sparrow
lying fallen in the dusty grass at my feet.

Lucy Crispin is a former Poet Laureate of South Cumbria who has recently been published in The Eildon Tree, Allegro, and The Blue Nib. She works freelance for the Wordsworth Trust and as a person-centred counsellor. Her micro-pamphlet, wish you were here, is forthcoming from Hedgehog Press, who will also publish her pamphlet, shades of blue, in 2020.