Achilles did not stand
before the loom of Helen
as Hektor did, you, Hektor,
who would so shortly after
feel the inexorable hand of Thetis’ son.
Nor did the Achaean warrior
trace in his mind’s eye
his own destiny there,
there amid the figures
etched upon my crimson weave-
some strewn out of battle array,
some routed, vanquished,
others triumphal, pursuant-
arranged like constellations in the astral plain
according to an order
prescribed in the annals of fate
by primordial gods
newly born out of
the chasm of creation.
Achilles had his own reason
to pick up sword.
Agamemnon, the pretense offered
by the corrupt prophecies of Chalcas.
But the gods, the gods had their designs.
Still, I am a guilty meditation
on the miasma
festering far beyond
the craggy landscape of a forsaken land
transported by an armada
launched in blood
and sunk into the sand
before the walls of the Scaian gates.
Forbidden desires
loosened her limbs, her mind,
and the unrestrained libido
of the warmongers,
who needed but a pretext
to issue forth
a cosmos engulfed
in a pandemic of bloodshed.
Indigent desires
they turned out to be.
Now, the winged deaths
of multitudes unsung
have found voice in me.
Shuttle in hand,
she paces to and fro,
like a phantom,
love burnt out of her eyes,
passions dried up
by an excess of their own thirst,
vaporized into nothing
like pearls of evening dew
evanesced in the harsh morning sun.
All will soon be ablaze
as if this scarlet web
were to bleed
into the cramped streets
of a beseiged city
and dye everything
in a wash of fiery red.
What on the broad back of black Earth
will escape the mesh
of these threads
untinged by the incarnadine
of cataclysm and carnage?
They say she will live in infamy
as the cause of all.
Pandora. Eve. Helen.
The names men give to their suffering.
Even she calls herself whore.
But, if she had a tongue and heart of bronze,
could she express so vividly as I
the daedal entanglements
wrought in the aftermath
of so reticulate a fate
that bears the name,
Helena?
*My day job is being a Professor of Classics. I teach ancient Greek and classical mythology, and, on occasion, I write poetry inspired by Homer and the Greek tragedians.
