The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient Greek hand-powered orrery variously dated to a period between 87 BC and 205 BC, and retrieved from the wreck of a Roman cargo ship in 1901. Machines of similar complexity did not appear again until the 14th century in western Europe.
Thwacked, along with the ship that carries it,
twisted free of rope shackles, it drops
through planks groaning and splintering apart,
splashes into the Aegean Sea. Lingers
afloat, as if the fate of everything on earth
is about to be decided, with slurps and gurgles
happening in and about it, lost
amid the shrieks of men and cargo’s wreck.
Sinks, silently spiralling, offers the illusion
of being a sea chest devoid of weight.
Emits bubbles, stirs dregs of silt that slowly lift
as it shoulders its way to the abyss.
Settles and stays, its bronze lustre dimming,
nuzzled by fish, which perform odd tilts
and takes around it, seeing themselves
in a mirror, pirouetting for an entry to shelter
or even status; eager – we may quip –
to solve the riddles it keeps, find their own
evolution magically quickened
by dials and pointers, gear-train complexities
not to be matched for another millennium.
There they plate its surface, vast
blurry generations of them vivifying it, dying
into it – accumulations of flesh, rust
and oblivion. It seizes up – the world no wiser –
this Egyptian calendar, tide watcher,
planet tracker, analogue computer.
Until, finally salvaged, the gleam of its genius
reaches us – but with a caution, perhaps,
as to how great feats or engines of civilisation,
raised against barbarity and loss,
are prone still to slip back into the darkness.
Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children's writer from Loughrea, Co. Galway. His tenth collection, Keepsake, appeared from Dedalus Press in 2024.