My poems about Greece are up on Verse-Virtual.com, the online journal that publishes a big batch of new poems every month.Here’s the link for the poems: http://www.verse-virtual.com/robert-knox-2016-july.html

Greece is both a country with an ancient civilization and, judging by our recent visit, a population that refuses to grow old. Hence the phenomenon of bearded, well-fleshed motorcyclists that we encountered on busy thoroughfares throughout the country. It’s not just “Ancient Greece” we encounter on our visit, but a very lively contemporary society.

The prevalence of active graybeards on bikes put me in mind of a famous fist line from one of W. B. Yeats’s most celebrated poems: “This is no country for old men.” This sentence is probably best known today as the title of a film by the Coen brothers that won a best picture Oscar in 2007. That film was based on a novel by Cormac McCarthy, who of course borrowed from Yeats’s poem for his title.

The poem we’re all borrowing from is “Sailing to Byzantium.” a work gleaming with brilliant, enduring phrases. The poet’s notion of old men is represented this way in the second stanza:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,…

Wow. Both great language and good advice.

For the rest of the story, see my blog:

http://prosegarden.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-garden-of-verse-ancient-land-with.html