Artemis Artemisos Poem by Rebecca Irvine Bilkau

The paint splashed path is curved
like ancient myth, its end in view
but endlessly removed; the lolling sea
is half a mile or half a step away
flirt-bright and liar-cold, reminding us

that in the Sporades spring bites.
We miss our step, crush into thyme
making the air sting with its offended
scent. The track’s below us now
comforting and chancy as the lifeline

on my palm. We skid down saffron scree
to reach it, endowing every boulder, every
bleak ravine with deity. The eye-less profiles
in the wind-raked scrub, strafe us
as we stoop to touch each stone scrum

for luck, rationally uncertain. And in the precincts
of Artemis, the huntress god, we stumble
on her spring, hard by the shrine of Artemisos,
patron saint of police. We should forget
they’re close as obsolete and reinvented

certainty and culture, belief
and morality, that pair, monitors
of days, eyes-on. Remembering,
we loose faith, clutch our myths of freedom
and run for the bushes, scared double.