The Death of Socrates
“Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.”
—Socrates, before the hemlock
From the highest roof in Athens, he toasts
the city that he loves—the curious youth
who gather daily just to hear his boasts
on Beauty, Justice, Liberty, or Truth—
and raising his drink above the pillared streets,
he rails against the city’s politics—
the council in their elevated seats
turning their handful of rhetorical tricks—
then lifts the goblet to his lips.
Sincere
Crito—the closest of his cohort, wise
beyond his years and of superior wit—
whispers something in his master’s ear,
who, sleeving the dribble from his beard, replies,
a quiver in his voice, “I drank what?”
Michael Shewmaker is the author of Leviathan (2023) and Penumbra (2017), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize. Born in Texarkana, Texas, he is the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His recent poems appear in Best American Poetry, The Believer, Harvard Review, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Stanford University and is an editor for 32 Poems. [www.michaelshewmaker.com]