The Hallowed City
I.
Aliusque et idem nasceris
When last I looked upon that golden hill,
the only coal-grey clouds along its crest
were pine-trees of Mediterranean zest,
clear-cut against the blue, timeless and still.
When I surveyed the city from the west,
beyond the river and the seventh hill,
my thirsty eyes rejoiced and drank their fill…
A pilgrimage it was and pagan quest.
Behind me passed the Sun on wheels of fire,
accompanied by Mnemosyne’s lyre.
Was this my long-lost and recovered home?
Born here and buried, had I now returned,
the same and not the same? My eye-lids burned.
This is the hallowed city. This is Rome.
Christina Egan © 2018
II.
Pulchrae loca vertor ad urbis
My eyes have seen the marble halls of Rome,
resplendent like the mighty mistress Moon
and multi-coloured like a field in bloom;
I’ve watched the buildings grow in brick and stone.
I’ve stood beneath the proud and perfect dome
which emulates the heavens’ sparkling room
and holds our destiny from dawn to doom.
I’ve roamed those hills and called a roof my home.
I’ve heard the chanting children, sighing harps,
the darting chariots and creaking carts,
the swish of virgin water, purple wine,
I’ve seen the aqueducts descend and curve,
the roads roll into Rome, unite, disperse —
I’ve tasted all that splendour. It was mine.
Christina Egan © 2018
The first blogpost of the year deals, as always, with Roman roads!
The impression of aqueducts, which illustrated one of my parents’ books about ancient civilisations, informed my entire life. Unfortunately, I do not know the artist, but there does not seem to be a copyright on it.
The quotes are from two Roman poems about Rome, Horace’s Carmen saeculare and Ovid’s Tristia.
I apply Horace’s idea that the sun is daily reborn, another and yet the same, to a person who feels he or she was reborn into this world many centuries later, another and yet the same; and I reinterpret Ovid’s lament about remembering his home from exile as a modern person’s longing for antiquity. Mnemosyne is the Greco-Roman divinity of memory, and the Sun and Moon, of course, are mighty gods, or at least representations of gods.
Christina Egan 