Greek phrenitikós, frantic

Silence isn’t stillness, agitation has me in its grip

remember reading       Greeks were like us

restless            underneath and again underneath

water wearing away               crevices          the itch

of canyons             skin I didn’t outgrow as

the doctor promised     burns hot and stinging

allergic to what I bring to it            allergic to

what I’m thinking     how much older 

the underpass is     filled to overflowing

blue-tented absence                corners with the leftover

plastic and cardboard     happens so fast        it isn’t

even my heart that’s              broken, 

time stealing               & leaking the blue cold

what it would have been to be        Greek

no cortisone     a body       historians

also thought women leaky        restless        for  what

out of one’s own        skin      a future they never

knew  who’d have thought        a daily  underpass 

so many leftovers     pizza  fries           near the  parking

what skin did we come wrapped in

Credit

Copyright © 2018 by Martha Ronk. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 26, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Lately I have been unable to separate private from public agitation—my own agitation and erupting allergies from the distress around me, increasing homelessness, tents under freeways. I obsess over broken systems, cities, bodies, poetic forms. All of us wrapped in similar skin. Years ago, I read a comparison between early Greek restlessness and American restlessness and began thinking about the ways such restlessness is spread across cultures and historical eras, as well as across our current landscape and individual bodies.”
Martha Ronk