Elpenor

Oh damn you Elpenor

last friend I had.

Nape-nerve snapped from a drunken fall

That night she turned us into swine.

Now it’s to hell in a hurry if I’m ever to get home.

Let out all her sail till wind belly the canvas

That she bear us quickly to Hades’ shore

  - for only there are questions answered.

 

What’s this? Elpenor here already

When we with wind jamming the tiller

left him for dead where he fell from Circe’s tower.

“Dear King, it’s me – unburied, unwept.

“Go back and put me under the ground

“and plant my oar as a marker that one day

 “I may be remembered.”

 

Now years spent in toilsome wandering

With one thing after the other

that put itself between I and home.

And what? To find my house filled with foul suitors,

Taxing my wealth to fill their bellies,

letches devouring another man’s hard work.

All the while pestering my wife –

telling her lies that I lay dead in sea’s bed

And how the property’s worth a fortune

If she’d only put herself in their hands.

And then to have evicted my dear father like a beggar!

 

Hic hyperusura and all for a banker’s boner.

The hell they will! I’ll wash the white marble

threshold with their putrid blood.

Come Telemachus, let’s do it.

 

Tonight deep planting and sweet repose

In moist furrows of salted earth.

The ripe moon shown through windowpane

Upon the undulations of rolling hills beneath the down.

 

Tomorrow’s dawn is born with prayer to the One

to whom even the old man Zeus bows his head.