DEREK SELLEN

AESOP

 

       after 'Aesop' by Velázquez

 

 

That face  –  you had to invent it,

a gaunt arrangement of bone and muscle,

someone who knows the quirks of pride and greed.

 

A man as near anonymous as it’s possible to be,

lending his vagrant name to others,

authoring tales long after he is dead.

 

One hand cups a book, the other’s slung

in his dust-brown coat, the wounded hand

of a general or the withered hand of a beggar.

 

A jobbing story-teller, a fabled fabulist,

with a biography that begins in the slave quarters

and ends at the bottom of a cliff.

 

By the threshold of power,

leaning slightly back in wry appraisal,

in the atrium of a global bank or the hallway of a parliament,

 

he sees the fox and cockerel in us.