atlas

Given that Plato was keen to imprison

poets of whatever stripe because of their

disinclination to tell the truth,

how chuzpah of him to write in detail

about The Island of Atlas aka

Atlantis – its topography, its people,

its constitution, its politics, all

compared unfavourably with Athens,

of course – as if he had evidence

that the island, inundated, he claimed,

as a result of human frailty, had

actually existed in that ocean

that bears the name of his invention,

west of the Pillars of Heracles.

 

Perhaps he was thinking of other places

whose alleged dystopia was punished

by flooding – though north not west of the Straits

of Gibraltar: like Kêr-Is off the coast

of Brittany, lost by a wayward king

or his wayward daughter – or Cantref Gwaelod

drowned under the waters of Cardigan Bay

by a carousing, drunken prince forgetting

to keep the island’s flood gates shut fast.

Or maybe they were tales told by poets

keen to tell the truth about power.