Kenneth Canatsey
Diogenes, on How Democracies Die
There is no honest face in Athens. Many
a day and night I’ve walked its streets until
my feet blistered—and when the blisters burst,
and sandals became unbearable, I wrapped my feet
in rags and kept on searching. I met smirking
hucksters on every corner. I stuffed my ears
with beeswax to escape their lies; they ran
like raw sewage through the streets.
The Demos has become polluted. Every man
looks only to his own advantage, his own
party, and each strives to outdo the other
in goading the fawning, fickle mob.
They love their games and festivals, their bacchanals;
they excel in hot rhetoric, and neglect
the duties of state.
They say Phillip of Macedon and his army
are marching toward the city. An army of our own
has gone out to meet them, somewhere on the plains
to the north. But those I talk to are tired of the endless
palaver of politicians who have forgotten
how to pass good laws. They say
they are weary of this thing called Democracy.
They crave a Tyrant: It is power they worship.
No, there are no longer any honest men,
not one, in this city that I love.
—Submitted on 02/09/2021
Kenneth Canatsey is the author of Silk Road: The Journey (XlibrisUS, 2015), Blessed Be the Anawim (Edwin Mellen Press, 1999), and The Daimon Call: A Travel Journal in Verse and Other Poems (Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), as well as the translator of A Bilingual Edition of Poems by St. John of the Cross: Spiritual Songs and Ballads (Edwin Mellen Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in journals and anthologies. He retired from a career as an registered nurse and case manager at the VA Medical Center in West Los Angeles.
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Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
