All right, one more poem.
I'm going to take you to ancient Greece.
Would you rather go to Mycenae or Delphi?
Delphi.
Everybody wants to go to Delphi.
All right, let's go to Delphi.
Mount Parnassus.
Let's go to Delphi.
So, Delphi, as you know, the women were the prophets.
But of course, they were drugged on these toxic gases.
So they spoke in nonsense language,
and it took the priests to interpret what they were saying
and whatever.
Let's not romanticize the ancient wisdoms,
but anyway, let's respect them.
So this is Delphi.
I went with my grandson Raymond, and he had done a semester
abroad in Bhutan and so he had a sense of Buddhist practice
that probably comes up at the end of the poem.
You might want to know that.
So here we are at Delphi.
Our guide shared the story of a prophecy.
The queen told her two sons: The brother
who kisses his mother first will be king.
One fell, the other stood and kissed her.
She chose the fallen one.
Why, the other protested, when I kissed you first?
Yes, but your brother kissed Mother Earth.
It's a good story to tell at Delphi, where it took a woman
to inhale the vapors rising from a crack in the hide
of ragged Mount Parnassus, and speak truth
to priests, though her words were unintelligible.
So they made up what they wanted to hear and called it prophecy.
No matter.
Walking among these ruins, rock, nuthatches
singing loud all around, it's impossible
not to feel the importance to the ones who prayed
and the ones who paid for the privilege of asking questions
there at the omphalos, where the surface opens to the depths.
Goats first identified the spot, dancing drunk in the fumes.
You can feel the weight of time layered like sedimentary rock.
Gaian worship to Pythian serpent to Apollo,
that god of order, harmony, and music, who
had to spend eight years as a mortal
to be cleansed after killing the Python who guarded the site,
all buried under stone, the old beliefs.
So lost that peasants built the village
of Kastri out of the sanctuary's rubble.
Even its location unknown for centuries,
the excavations only began in 1892.
If not for the persistence of stories,
the dig would never have begun, no pick or shovel, no fox
hairbrush, no slow reveal, no astonishment at what
the excavations exposed.
Art as healing grace.
Ray and I arrived at the Temple of Apollo
from our separate walks in the ruins, sat on the stone wall.
It was nothing we'd planned or discussed.
I saw him rest his palms upturned on his knees,
and I met his gesture with my own.
We sat that way at a distance in quiet,
palms raised, ready to receive the light that
might fall into them from that elevated air.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]