What remains is writ in water,
writ again in the purpled gardens of the mind,
viewed in the tattered remnants of adversity,
unresurrected, in all honesty, undead.

Hands around your lover’s waist,
kissing her waif-face,
eyes shining with tears,
mouth tasting of brandy,
swilling around memories.

A ghost dog sits on the gravestone
looking at the azure ocean,
remembering the battle for Athens,
so many Turkish dead.

You wrote about the pacific ocean,
never having tasted its surf, proudly,
not so far from your Moorish poems of loss and dereliction,
marbled perfections of pink and gold.

You always thought fascists merely kill
but nothing can kill the workings of the heart;
those bully-boy troopers can not kill our fight
to understand the many languages of the heart.

Grave of John Keats, Rome