An Ancient Field

I sometimes close my eyes

And perceive an ancient field

Where honor never dies

Behind an ancient wall of shields

I walk among the Peers

I've bled with since a lad

Beneath a copse of spears

I stride out brazen clad

The sun is hot upon my back

My helmet fills with salt

But then the foe starts his attack

So it's forward we vault

We have no drums for rhythm

No pipes to keep the time

Our forces fill the schism

Our Andreia fills the rhyme

Our Lambdas chip and crack

As the arrows fill our shields

I feel my Aspis thwack

As I bring my fear to heel

We finally reach their line

And our dories come to bear

They call on the divine

To deliver them from there

And I hear my captain say

As I walk amidst the squallor

"If all the world were just

There would be no need for valor"

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Notes: So the back-story on this is I've always been a bit of a laconiphile, in fact I tend to list Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield as one of my all time favorite novels. I'm not, however, the worlds biggest spartan afficinado, that honor goes to a fellow i'm currently working with. So great, in fact, is his love of Laconia, that one night on post he fashioned himself a spear out of a random broom handle, 550 cord, and God knows what else. One night, he came up to the post I'm working at and asked me to sing him a song.
"You don't want me to do that," I tell him hoping to spare his ear drums.
"Sing me a song," he insists.
So in the end I compromise and end up reciting a few of my poems. By the time I finish the first he had a look of enchantment upon his face. At this point he asked me to write him a spartan poem. So I wrote the following piece, basing the theme off of the immortal words of Aegisaleus, "If all the world were just there would be no need for valor."

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