Golden Age

By Timothy Steele b. 1948 Timothy Steele

Even in fortunate times,

The nectar is spiked with woe.

Gods are incorrigibly

Capricious, and the needy

Beg in Nineveh or sleep

In paper-gusting plazas

Of the New World’s shopping malls.

Meantime, the tyrant battens

On conquest, while advisers,

Angling for preferment, seek

Expedient paths. Heartbroken,

The faithful advocate looks

Back on cities of the plain

And trudges into exile.

And if any era thrives,

It’s only because, somewhere,

In a plane tree’s shade, friends sketch

The dust with theorems and proofs,

Or because, instinctively,

A man puts his arm around

The shoulder of grief and walks

It (for an hour or an age)

Through all its tears and telling.

Timothy Steele, “Golden Age” from Sapphics and Uncertainties: Poems 1970-1986. Copyright � 1986, 1995 by Timothy Steele. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Arkansas Press, www.uapress.com.

Source: Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (1986)

Biography

Timothy Steele was born in 1948 in Burlington, Vermont, and holds degrees from Stanford University and Brandeis University, where he studied with the poet J.V. Cunningham. The influence of formal masters like Cunningham and Yvor Winters, a force at Stanford for much of the early 20th century, is apparent in Steele’s poetry, which is notable for its allegiance to traditional forms, meters, and rhyme schemes. Though Steele has . . .

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