the stars burn...

O, sea rover, fight...

The storm split roofs and hurled boats ashore, uprooting trees, damaging walls.

Slowly, the old town pulls itself together.

Old town-you have seen many storms during your centuries. Is it true, you let this one slip past you and sent it to sea? You should have kept it! You can withstand battering better than a small ship! Is it true, what the fishermen say, that many were drowned?

Men and boys go about town, picking up tiles to load their baskets.

Driftwood clutters the beach.

Men were hurling stones, grabbing them off the beach and throwing them. I heard them hit Pittakos and saw him stagger, his flapping rags jerking, his arm flung over his eyes. Silent, feet wide apart, he stayed his ground.

Alcaeus, facing the sea, lidless-eyed, roared and lunged about, arms extended, yelling:

"Kill him...kill him...let me wring his neck!"

Beside him, the madman off the raft, howled and hurled stones.

About a dozen men were circling Pittakos, most of them blabbing defiance, closing in.

I rushed to Alcaeus and squeezed past him, to cry out... I told them to stop, asking them to stop in the name of our island, our town.

"Get back," Alcaeus warned.

I faced them, feeling their hate: it bubbled through me, seemed to ooze from the sand, from the sea, from antiquity: the hates of my ancestors, hatred of tyranny and unfairness.

No one threw: they watched me, as I walked toward Pittakos: maybe they thought I had a stone.

"You get back," I cried. "Go home, before they kill you, Pittakos.

Get back everyone...go home."

Nervously folding and unfolding his robe, Pittakos backed away. A hand went to a spot where a stone must have struck. I felt no pity but stepped closer.

"I don't know what caused these men to turn on you... I don't want to know...go home, before it's too late."

Without replying, he shuffled away, a sandal off.

"Is he going?" asked Alcaeus, finding me, hand on my shoulder.

"Let him go," I said, facing the others.

Grasping Alcaeus, I forced him to walk with me, muttering to him, seeing Thasos, dropping his stones with a guilty grin.

I wanted to forget the faces but I knew most of the men: young, bearded faces, most of them friends of Alcaeus, some of them his soldiers.

"Don't lead me," Alcaeus protested.

"You need to be led."

"You came at the wrong time."

"What's to become of you?"

"Let me go," he said.

"I'll see you home. Here, Thasos, take his arm. Thasos, were you mad?"

"We should have stoned him."

"Why?"

"He quarreled with Alcaeus-spat on him."

Alcaeus leaned on me and I sensed his weariness as if it were mine: he was breathing hard and had to rest, stopping again and again. Behind us, his madman wandered, his Pamphilus.

"I'm too old for this kind of horseplay, it seems."

Thasos and I were saddened by his tragic features; we frowned; minute wrinkles had enlarged and deepened; his hands trembled; his mouth was open. He seemed in the past, with his men, galled, waiting: What is memory for, I asked myself, to crucify? Shut off from the day, is this the best memory can do?

When I sat with him at home, I said:

"What was the quarrel about?"

"First, some water."

Thasos brought us water. The cool of his gourd helped.

"Pittakos has stolen from the city...again...I came at him with the facts...I know the truth...many of us know."

We remained silent a while, my hand in his.

"It's an old truth-for us," I said.

"Very old," he said.

Presently, the madman entered, carrying himself stiffly, chalk faced, chastised. Oblivious of us, appearing more normal than any time I had seen him, he talked with Thasos, regretting the incident.

Soft-talking men, inside an inner room, brought home to me the.

innocence of our own lives, how based on impulse, how like kelp, twisting, sinking, headed for shore, dragged to sea: we are mad, we are sane, or between: we exert ourselves and the world seeks revenge; we accept and earn ridicule and belittlement: we affirm ourselves and alter our lives and the lives of others: war is such an affirmation.