Post #4073848

ODYSSEUS, LOUT Odysseus, lout, sucking up to Goddesses, lording it over women. Male chauvinist incorrigible, Vain, vengeful, humourless, dull Spinner of complex lies for their own sake, Ill at ease with the day's truth. Merciless sacker of cities beyond necessity, Generous with your companions' lives. Raconteur. Survivor. Deliberately Homer Re-strings his lyre to Woman's waning Moon. Loosens those gold hexameters To praise, half-praise the mercenary Soldier's sly return to Ithaca. Penelope at mysterious forty Among her chattering maids in that sea-open, Sun-filled, salt-sweet chamber In her high tide of beauty spins, unspins. Toes neatly spliced in sandals of soft gold On marble, silk, fleeces of new-born lambs She lunches with the girls on pomegranate-seeds, On milky kid, and amber wine. Sometimes alone, Sometimes with men. Thug, Odysseus! Having slaughtered without compunction Despite their frank and winning, well-phrased pleas All the young Suitors your competitors (Boy-bard excepted, spared to sing your praises) Unconcernedly you arranged to strangle Those twelve of your wife's maidservants Who'd had affairs (so said the old nurse spitefully) With twelve young men you'd just shot arrows through Using that monstrous bow no man but you (Hero Odysseus) could bend to string. Odysseus, you forced those women Moaning with fear, to wash down with sea-sponges All that blood from the terrace, clean the tables, Then collect and put tidy the warm bodies of the killed. This done, you got Telemachus, your subservient son, To hang the girls up on their own washing-line Drawn taut, like "a row of skylarks caught in a net." The girls' feet, you noticed, for some moments danced Odysseus, you should have died at Troy In flight from Hector. Or in your mocking Horse. Stayed with those pigs on Circe's isle, Aeaea, Or in the wounded Cyclop's cave with rams. And left Penelope to love again in Ithaca, And every woman choose in the sun her man. [Piboulède, Summer 1987]