Commended: Sasha Mostafa, The Foundations of Western Society

Sasha Mostafa

Commended - 2025 Tower Poetry Competition, 'Roots'

The Foundations of Western Society 

An Ancient Greek course - only

an hour a week.

Friday nights in wicked

autumn, the sky as blue

as a milk top, curling around

the clouds. The alphabet is fiddly

and lacerates my teenage understanding

of proxemics. No longer

can I generalise, estimate,

think beside or in between.

We trudge through our acrid history:

slaves, battles, idle men

with their futile games

of fetch and chase.

At the end of each lesson

we win a bedtime story from myth

or tragedy - children butchered

with wit, captive women used

by whips of gold, blisters

on the bed of a king. The light

in the classroom yellows, withers,

clings to what has grown

from the cavernous evenings.

I am asked what I have gained

by taking the course.

I say that now I know 

how to walk down 

a street of ghosts

without fear.