Stuart
Barnes lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he writes & edits PASH capsule, a journal of contemporary love poetry. Poems
are forthcoming in Southerly, blackmail
press, sacred /
profane, Mascara
Literary Review, &Assaracus: A Journal
of Gay Poetry.
The Secret History,
your prized
thyrsus,
soon became mine
(no other could’ve prised my twenty-first
fist).
fist). In a leather bar
that Frenchman’s
spiteful
spiteful telling,
then the laughter—
The Bacchic shout† awoke
A shoot entwined your throat
Quickly
I grasped some antiquity’s
safer
veiled.
†… I have chosen
Thebes as the first place
To raise my Bacchic shout, and clothe all who respond
In fawnskin habits, and put my thyrsus in their hands –
The weapon wreathed with ivy-shoots –
—Euripides, The
Bacchae, translated by Philip Vellacott, Penguin Books, 1973
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