the Archaeological Museum, Athens

For how long did it live as a single thought
among the serene meditations of unschooled fish,
under the skyway of waves where there is
no light to tell a shadow from darkness?
And how did it come to rise, this bronze Poseidon,
born from its own ocean as we too
are born of our own ideas not at dawn
but midday, surprised, even moved, by our own
arrival? Ravished, hollow, poised to throw
its handful of nothing, it left us dumbstruck