The King’s Question

In memory of Nancy Tow Spiegel Before he put his important question to an oracle, Croesus planned to test all the famous soothsayers, Sending runners half around the world, to Delphi, Dodona, Amphiarius, Branchidae, and Ammon, So as to determine the accuracy of their words; His challenge: not to say anything of his future But rather what he was doing in his capital, Sardis (Eating an unlikely meal of lamb and tortoise, Exactly one hundred days after messengers had set out). This posed a challenge, then, of far space not of time: Of seeing past dunes and rock fortresses; of flying, Freighted, above caravans and seas; of sightedness, As it were, in the present construed as a darkened room. Croesus of Lydia sought by this means to gauge The unplumbed limits of what each oracle knew, Hesitant to entrust his fate to any unable to divine Lamb and tortoise stewing in a bronze pot. When only the Pythia of Apollo at Delphi correctly Answered from her cleft, her tripod just the lens For seeing into the royal ego, she put his mind to rest, But not before speaking in her smoke-stung voice: I count the grains of sand on the beach and the sea’s depth; I know the speech of the dumb and I hear those without voice.