The Greek government's threat to offer its people a referendum on the euro-bailout package before the finalisation of that package may yet lead to another glorious Thermopylae moment. If they say NO to the empire they will take heavy casualties but secure their freedom, and probably bring the whole empire down eventually.
On a lighter note I present my Samhain Eisteddfod poem here publicly, as its on a secular rather than an internal metaphysical topic. So celebrate this halloween with a poem about the most comprehensively dead person of my knowledge, an ancestor from some 34,000 years ago.
Paviland Man, some thoughts upon Europe’s oldest tomb.
Pavilander, what took you in your prime
Those thirty thousand years ago?
Was that mighty mammoth skull
Laid to rest with you by friends
Some token of your final fearsome prey?
So how on earth did you bring to ground
Eleven tons of muscle and tusk
With flint headed spears?
Or did you heave great boulders down
From the top of the cliffs
Or stampede them over it
With blazing fire torches
Whatever, it must have took cunning and guts.
For such a fine send off
You must have had love or respect
Precious grave goods and offerings of ochre
And what was that for, that blood of the earth
For strength in the next world
Or a token of honour in this one?
I’d guess you would have had children
By your age in those ancient times.
Though over a thousand lifetimes
Separates you from us currently here
You may live in our blood and our genes
But your language we can never know
Yet your tools and your ornaments and tomb
Say to us plainly and clearly
That you must have had thoughts just like ours.
Your friends they gave you the best plot
A high vaulted cave of a million years, facing the sun
Proud and bleak it stands in the bare cliff face
It has seen the seas draw back and turn into plains
And watched the seas return again
Though dolmens and barrows may crumble
Or be stripped of their turf and their stones
That cave survived the glaciers the floods and the storms
The invention of farming left it untouched
Kingdoms came and went, unnoticed
Our feeble buildings do not last like caves do
Our empires rise and fall again to dust,
Let us hope our last archaeologist
Returns you to your resting place
When this fragile civilisation crumbles - like the rest.