Today's poem is by Kim Addonizio

In the Afterlife,
       

if you were Greek, you might end up in Elysium, which was like Heaven only with better music
& also sports if you were tired of lounging in the shade of an olive tree

drinking a flinty Assyrtiko from Santorini or a Peloponnesian red, but then again Minos
might damn you to dreary Tartarus for murder or robbing a temple—slaughter & gold,

slaughter & many bronze statues. In my religion, which is basically who the fuck knows
what happens after we die & no one can prove anything anyway,

I imagine the spirits of some of those Greeks crawling into their marble likenesses
to hunker down inside the folds of a stone robe, looking out with their painted eyes

until the paint faded, losing their arms & noses, genitalia sheared off, their heads stolen,
torsos dazzling & instructing the lyric poets. When my mother was dying & couldn't speak

I sat with her & told her I knew she was in there, listening, & what might have been a tear
appeared on her worn old cheek, but really I had no idea. All I could see was her suffering.

In Athens I saw bodiless pairs of feet, all that was left of whoever they were—even the gods
couldn't keep from disappearing, replaced by racks of cheap souvenir laurel crowns,

mati pendants & brightly decorated phallus keychains. The Greeks believed
the dead were kept alive by memory, but my religion says nothing brings them back

& you can't even touch the statues in museums. At the ruined Temple of Olympian Zeus
three wild parrots crossed the walkway in front of me, all in a row. Like a fallen

green & living column, I thought, & then thought, no.

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Copyright © 2023 Kim Addonizio All rights reserved
from The Southern Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission