Libya - still too soon to celebrate?

This morning there is still fighting in Libya, people are still suffering and it would have been so much better if their revolution could have happened non-violently, but it does seem as though the worst may be over. On my father's birthday (he would have been 107 today) I want to celebrate a little with some of his writings about the country he loved, especially for its Classical past and its Mediterranean countryside. This is from his book, Green Mountain, published by Faber in 1963 and sadly long out of print.

It's only since I've been living here in the Languedoc that I've realised quite how much the Libyan environment was imprinted in me during my childhood, when I find myself drawn to places that are like the 'green mountain' I remember, and a couple of years ago I wrote this:

Cyrenaican Way

The road threads through
gateways in flood-eroded rock
and a desert in miniature,
sand encircled by stone that blossoms
rosemary in unexpected crevissess
where roots take precarious hold,
to the turn where earth becomes deep red,
rock strata slanting on gravel
where only low succulents
can creep, it's as though
I'm in Libya again.

At home I leaf the pages back
to the Green Mountain,
my father's words filling in shadows
on the road to Apollonia, his favourite,
down to the aromatic plain
where he found his place, discovered
he was a Cyrenaic, a follower of Aristippus -
'something about the air and the soil'.

The width of a sea and years
away from that other Mediterranean shore,
on the hill above Neffiès I stop and bring
the asphodel into close-up. Strange to look down
on the starlike flowers I remember
as tall as I was, backdropped
by crumpled-tissue cistus petals
and the thyme plants I carry home,
sweet scent of pleasure. (TW, 2009)

I hope that the Libyan people will soon find the sweet scent of pleasure once more.