In Plato’s Cave

I am blind and burnt.
An old man taught me home’s forgetting,

murderous seducer left me lost,
took the last path I knew

drained past parents piety.
I watched him mix them with hemlock

saying follow me as his legs went cold.
Some strange immortality closed his eyes

as he gave my hopes to Hades.
More than all I loved him, I loved

his insistent dying, his selfish folly
his lips when they swayed me to his side.

But I am dying unkissed in darkness
worse than Lethe he called truth—

I would settle now
for a flash of Aegean sun.

—Samuel Loncar