A Fumbled Catch (In defense of Plato)

By John H.B. Martin

Plato's Symposium - Anselm Feuerbach (1869)

Featured in our forthcoming New Lyre - Spring 2025 issue

A Fumbled Catch

in defence of Plato

A face more beautiful than it is true.
A face all surface - like a peach - without
that goodness most would hope to find within,

unsucculent and quite dissatisfying,
though, at first glance, so tempting and so cool…

Here Nature manifests a glance more cruel
than my less predatory abstract gaze
would draw from it, if soundly advertised
by manufacturers more well-disposed

to what most mortals silently would crave:
a face commensurate with all love promised…

But expectation drowns out mere denouement
till every embassy, once steeped in sin,
insists we penetrate it through and through.

Stay tuned for spring 2025

After Dark

a symposium

Diotima speaks:

Do not compare me to a Summer's day!
I am less grey than that, and offer brilliance
more bright than you've grown used to yet, you thugs.