Poem of the week: Phoenician by Angela Leighton

A chilling double sonnet finds the echo of ancient ritual sacrifice in modern ‘collateral damage’

Carol Rumens

Monday 19 July 2024

Phoenician

by Angela Leighton

They build and spoil, raise and raze, sandgrain

castles to edge the shore — an advancing standstill.
Nothing of them will remain to meet the new day.

We who are old gaze seawards, where black sails make
moveable As on the horizon, calling a name:

Alpha, Aleph, an ox head, letters that spell
our dimly literate past in a Phoenician place.

But all I remember’s a mask, its grimace or smile

like an old man’s wrinkled face — ironic, set

in the crazed rictus of a grin at something hidden.

Hard to relate if they burned their children alive

all smiling, smiling in masks to pleasure a god
who’d thus not see their terror or hear their cries

but accept the sacrifice: the life’s soft parts
disguised by that hard laughter baked to last.

We dream and stare — drowsy, late historians,

wise, after our years. In the day’s museum

çsuch gleeful trophies wink. Keepsakes, you’d think?

each terracotta, twice fired to save its face.

These Tophet memorials haunt within our walls,
sardonic casts recording no name or age,

a comic strip we cannot conceive or face
outfacing us. (Their alphabet is ours).

Collateral. (Think — a smokescreen.) Are we blind, by half?
The drones we make explode elsewhere in fires.

So many children … their lives. Earthenware survives —
and these mad masks. Is theirs (listen) the last laugh?

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A new unpublished poem by Angela Leighton, poet, critic and author of the recent Carcanet collection Something, I Forget, Phoenician discovers the fusion between ritual child sacrifice in a distant culture and its practice, differently named, in the present.

In a note describing the significance of the “grinning mask”, Leighton writes: “The museum on the Phoenician island of Motya (off Sicily) contains a curious mask from the Tophet – the burial site where children and animals were probably sacrificed, by fire, to the god Baal. Numbers are uncertain and the whole issue has been much debated among archaeologists, but some have suggested that parents or victims wore these masks to hide their anguish from the god. Whatever the facts, the poem figures the mask as a cover of a more contemporary kind.”

Before it reveals the mask, the poem weaves other timelines, moving from a view of the children to be sacrificed building their last sandcastles, to the present day where “we who are old” watch from the shore the “black sails” out at sea. Itself a time-travelling image, “black sails” are associated with the legend of Theseus. Currently, they’re favoured by the owners of luxury yachts: the blackness protects the carbon fibre sails against UV damage, and extends their durability.

Introduced in the fifth stanza, the mask is shown to be disturbingly ambiguous. Its “grimace or smile” seems to reflect the true horror of the situation. What’s described as “the crazed rictus of a grin at something hidden”, designed “to pleasure a god”, rearranges the contorted anguish on the living face beneath. The mask ultimately extends far into time “that hard laughter, baked to last”. A potent idea for the poem, longevity is signalled again in the reference to “each terracotta, twice fired to save its face”. This idea of literal face-saving reforms into the metaphorical kind. It floats us closer to the present, where children’s death in the fires of war is too often face-savingly presented as “collateral”.

Leighton also time-travels via the alphabet, from the movable A-shapes of the yacht sails, through the Greek “Alpha” to the Semitic “Aleph”, thought to be derived from the Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox head. The poem connects us to “our dimly literate past in a Phoenician place” and reminds us, through a further pun linked to the word “face”, that the masks, perhaps museum-shop mass-produced, are “a comic strip we cannot conceive or face / outfacing us” and that, in a gentle, parenthetic reminder, “(Their alphabet is ours)”.

The line that forms the vital hinge between the dimly lit, “dimly literate past” and current political responsibility asserts “the drones we make explode elsewhere in fires”. The “elsewhere” doesn’t signal western arms sales alone; it points to the fact that the technology its engineers may first intend for human benefit can be co-opted elsewhere.

That familiar sad irony that “things” so often live longer than the people with whom they were associated is heightened at the end of the poem in an elision, which, on the page, provides a typographical image of brevity: “So many children … their lives.” It’s chilling, then, to imagine hearing the children having “the last laugh” as the poem asks us to, again in parenthesis, but in the imperative voice, “(listen)”. Are we being asked to imagine the children resurrected, restored to what they were at the start of the poem? Or is it that now, somehow, inhabiting the “mad masks”, the children have become equally sardonic, laughing at us now because our sympathy remains so limited, our humanity so under-achieved, because “civilisation” resembles the “advancing standstill” of line three, still ready and able to sacrifice children to the national war gods?

Perhaps both kinds of laughter are indicated, another telling ambiguity in a poem whose only borders are those derived from the verbal patterning of line and stanza, the subtle 14-couplet, doubled-sonnet design.

THE GUARDIAN