Rocking the bones of the old (Michael Longley: Homer's Laertes)

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Pensioners waiting outside a closed National Bank branch and hoping to get their pensions, argue with a bank employee through a closed door in Iraklio on the island of Crete: photo by Stefanos Rapanis/Reuters, 29 June 2014

Michael Longley: Laertes

When he found Laertes alone on the tidy terrace, hoeing
Around a vine, disreputable in his gardening duds,
Patched and grubby, leather gaiters protecting his shins
Against brambles, gloves as well, and, to cap it all,
Sure sign of his deep depression, a goatskin duncher,
Odysseus sobbed in the shade of a pear-tree for his father
So old and pathetic that all he wanted then and there
Was to kiss him and hug him and blurt out the whole story,
But the whole story is one catalogue and then another,
So he waited for images from that formal garden,
Evidence of a childhood spent traipsing after his father
And asking for everything he saw, the thirteen pear-trees,
The apple-trees, forty fig-trees, the fifty rows of vines
Ripening at different times for a continuous supply,
Until Laertes recognised his son and, weak at the knees,
Dizzy, flung his arms around the neck of great Odysseus
Who drew the old man fainting to his breast and held him there
And cradled like driftwood the bones of his dwindling father.

Michael Longley: Laertes (after Odyssey 24.226-348), from Gorse Fires, 1991

A woman pulling a shopping cart reacts outside a closed Eurobank branch in Athens. Greece closed its banks and imposed capital controls on Sunday to check the growing strains on its crippled financial system, bringing the prospect of being forced out of the euro into plain sight: photo by Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters, 29 June 2015