Yeltel recently challenged me to write a pantoum on a nautical theme with references to ancient Greece and this is it. I dedicate it to Sappho, a Greek poet so widely respected as a lyric poet in her day that Plato once described her as the tenth muse. She lived on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea over 600 years before the birth of Christ. Only a few fragments of her verse survive. They are of unutterable beauty and some have a gentle underlying eroticism. Sadly most of her work is now lost. My poem is a quest, an odyssey if you like, a vain search for all this lost beauty.

A pantoum has repeating lines throughout. The 2nd and 4th lines of each stanza are repeated as the 1st and 3rd lines of the next. Additionally, to complete the circularity, the 3rd and 1st lines of the poem become, respectively, the 2nd and 4th lines of the last stanza.

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