Above Troy

From here you look down
On the whole spit that divides
The harbour from the coast,
And see the long ocean beach,
The littleness of buildings
In the town, the launches,
Yachts, the container ships
Moored and in motion,
In comprehensive vacancy.
Though real estate agents
Have reason to disagree –
Property investors too –
Because there is money
To be made in having a view,
There is nothing to see
In a sight such as this but
Things and their movement
And all that is obvious.
True, you can hold it all
In single encompassment –
You and everything else,
As great-browed Zeus himself,
From the heights of Olympus –
And taste in a little way
The entertainment of deity,
But he had Achilles to watch,
Noble Hector, lovely Helen too.
These, we know, are long
Departed – no trace of footfall
On the blood-soaked and
Sea-washed sand. Consider
Though that the gods remain,
With your immortal parent,
Seated still in golden halls
Beyond the crown of this hill,
In wondering watch over you.
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Harold Jones is a New Zealander, educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in UK and NZ literary journals. He has been a prize-winner in national UK and NZ poetry competitions, and, as a lyricist, in the UK Songwriting Contest, the largest such event in the world. A selection of his work in AUP New Poets Four (Auckland University Press, 2011), drew the UK review, “this excellent poet, a kind of Ted Hughes crossed with Bukowski,” with a further selection, Curriculum Vitae (Xlibris, 2014), reviewed in NZ as “downright incredible.” His work has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Al Alvarez, “I like the elegance and control, the drive to say something rather than just to cut a fashionable figure," and Ted Hughes, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the US his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.

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