Thermopylae

Tonight the stream of consciousness
leads back to Thermopylae -
the legacy the Spartan king
bequeathed, facing an adversary
who sought to buy what he
could not defeat, unconvinced
that there are those whose honour
can't be traded.
 
Like Leonidas, there are some
who cannot live with travesty,
whose battlefield is where truth
challenges the empire of the lie.

And Xerxes, ever cynical, keeps testing
his hypothesis that every Spartan leader
has his price. But you know otherwise.

Alone beneath your black skies
in the ash of spent millennia
you guard the pass to future
revelations, against hostile night.
Your spiritual armour, worn
in crystal dawn's translucent guise,
bears traces of galactic journeys,
odyssies through fire and ice.

But for Thermopylae, Sparta's
heritage would not survive.
The oracle was wise, the Spartan king
prepared for sacrifice.

Long after Efialtis sold his country
to the horde, the epic valour thus betrayed
commands respect abroad - not least because
Leonidas was well aware the pass must fall,
but chose to die, his back against the wall,
his spiritual victory adamantine,
a bequest to time - a prism blazing
like a hilltop beacon, to ignite the mind.


 
 
*At Thermopylae (Greece) in 480 BC, a small
force of Spartans, led by their king, Leonidas,
defended a strategically vital mountain pass
against the numerically vastly superior force
of Xerxes, king of Persia, whose goal was to
capture Athens to the south. The Spartans were
betrayed by a compatriot, Efialtis (the word
for nightmare in modern Greek), who guided the
Persians to positions from which they could
then encircle and capture the pass.