Lew Welch

 

 
Atlantis Was Crete 
a poem for magick-dabblers 
 
 


A long time ago, on a clear day,
hairy little men with greedy eyes sat
looking across blue water     fingering
sharp bronze & breathing quick:


         "Sissy Island!
         Bull Jumpers! Their females lift their breasts in
         cages of silver . . .
         One took feathers & wax and stuck them into
         wings & his boy fell all the down from
         Sun (like anybody could have said he would)"

So they sacked it.
Burned it down to
Myth and sheep farms ever since

Dreamed Atlantis in our later brains


You can walk about that palace now
flush, I suppose, those oldest toilets in the world &
eat a dish of fish-head soup with
natives looted 35 hundred years ago

who do not know or
give a damn about it