Iambi IV / 194

An Imitation of Callimachus’ Iambi

Once on the hill of Tmolus
a laurel and an olive got into a fight,
or rather the laurel decided to pick on the olive,
making a kind of susurrus with her new leaves
to get the older tree’s attention,
then launching in.
“What house lacks me” (she said)
“across its lintel,
what priest of Apollo refuses to carry me?
The Pythian oracle reclines
on beds of my feuilletons,
and sets me on fire in order to see what she sees.
With Phoebus on my side I took away
the plague in Ionia. I can let humans cast spells.
Worshippers carry me in their round dance;
athletes and singers crave me as their prize,
and I am carried to Delphi in holy procession.
I am so holy that I am not allowed
to approach sites of mourning and sorrow;
nobody wants to leave me in a grave,
whereas your wood, lowly olive,
is always the right thing for funeral pyres.”


The laurel’s oily rival
responded right away: “My lovely friend,
my swan, my peerless
gorgeous one, you don’t understand.
At all. No honor is greater
than to go with the dead,
casualties of battle,
white-haired ladies and men,
and all the others for whom
I witness their passage out of this life; my twigs
snap with pride over any path
that pallbearers and mourners choose to walk.
There is no holier sound
than that percussive music.
Better this role alone
than to be some game’s prize.
That said, I am also a prize,
the one given in the Olympic
Games, a higher place
than anything Delphi holds.
I am not, however, given
to the loquacious, the versifying boasters
for their amplitudinous ornamentation.
I’d rather shut up and listen.” But then two doves
who nest in the olive’s branches spoke up: one asked,
“Who made the laurel? Who created the olive?”
“What about the grape, the oak, the fir?”
“Pallas Athena made the olive: that’s
how she became the patron of Athens,
winning her contest against the god of salt water.”
“But divine Apollo made the laurel.
Comparing origins isn’t going to help.”
“What can you do with the berries that grow on laurel?
You can’t eat them, or drink them, or even make jewelry.
Olives, on the other hand . . . there’s oil,
and tapenade, and pickling, and so much — 
they can even be used as solid measures,
or baked into something like bread in famine or emergency.
As for Apollo, it was the curve of the olive’s
trunk that gave much-needed rest
to his mother and the mother of Artemis,
generous, vexed, hidden Leto.”
“We have a winner.”
The laurel shook. The olive let the wind
keep moving around her knotty trunk, at her own pace.
Then a rosebush spoke up, or rather
had barely begun to speak, with her scratchy throat
that took so long to clear, when the laurel
cut in: “You have no right
to start comparing yourself to either of us.
You’re not on our level. You’ve never been
the gift of any god,
and when you try to speak, it’s like burps in brass,
far away, mixed with grunts and scrapes and baas.”
But the olive let
the wind move on at her own pace,
and seemed to tilt a low branch toward the earth,
and both the doves turned back to their small nest.