BRISEIS

by Gail White

Apulian Red-Figure Amphora by the Painter of the Berlin Dancing Girl ca. 430-410 BCE depicting Achilles and Briseis. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Women have few speaking parts

in the Iliad. At the beginning,

Briseis is torn away from Achilles

with never a word. But when Agamemnon

finally decides to make up the quarrel

and sends her back, Patroclus is dead

and her grief is for him, the most decent man

in the crowd, and the kindest.

You would not let me grieve, she says,

when Achilles had killed my father and brothers

and taken me captive; you always promised

Achilles would marry me.

That's what the women

have to look forward to in wartime:

with any luck, the man who murdered

your brothers will marry you. Although Achilles

did no such thing. Most likely he shunted

her off to the loom and kept her weaving

new tunics for him while he sent letters

over the wall to young Polyxena,

the bait that would lead him to his death.

Soldiers die, and the race of heroes

is gone: today there is no Achilles,

Patroclus, or angry Agamemnon.

But look at the eyes of captured women:

Briseis is there, forever dragged

away, forever and ever silent.

Gail White is a formalist poet and a contributing editor to Light. Her most recent collections are Asperity Street and Catechism. She lives in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with her husband and cats. 

MYRMIDONS

by Ralph La Rosa

after and with Thoreau

"Hawk Eye" by Tom Tomorrow at The Nib

The main lesson from Afghanistan is that 

the ‘war on terror’ does not work 

—Mary Kaldor, The Guardian, August 24, 2021

Ants battled on my Walden woodpile,

Small reds against much larger blacks.

The wood was strewn with dying and dead:

Imperialist blacks and republican reds.

 

A red clamped on a black ant’s chest

Was shaken till a back leg broke.

I watched another red assault

The black ant’s back and gnaw his neck—

 

An Achilles avenging his Patroclus?

The black destroyed all the reds’ limbs,

Lopped off their heads and left with them.

Who won this internecine bellum?

 

Most warrior Myrmidons soon dead,

Ant squads claimed corpses, black and red.

 

 

Author’s Note: This poem attempts to be a microcosm of Thoreau’s discussion in Walden, Chapter 12: “Brute Neighbors.”

Like Thoreau, Ralph La Rosa finds little to commend ants inhumanity to ants.

ACHILLES IN MEMORIAM

by Janice D. Soderling

Graphic: Odysseus With Achilles In The Underworld. Attica red-figure vase, ca 480 B.C. When Odysseus visits the Underworld in The Odyssey, Achilles tells him, “Glorious Odysseus: don’t try to reconcile me to my dying. I’d rather serve as another man’s labourer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead.”

Eulogies are written by the living,

never by the dead,

who would probably have said

something quite different about life and giving.

Janice D. Soderling has often published at The New Verse News over the years.  Her most recent collections are War: Make that City Desolate and Rooms and Closets.

TALKING ABOUT TREES

by Bonnie Naradzay

The Great Conjunction of 2020 will brighten the darkest day of the year as the two giant planets of our solar system draw closer together in the night sky than they have been in centuries. By chance, the day that Jupiter and Saturn will appear closest for Earth-based stargazers is Dec. 21, the winter solstice, which is the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. Photo: The galactic core area of the Milky Way over Maskinonge Pond in Waterton Lakes National Park, Alberta on July 14, 2020. Jupiter is the bright object at left, with Saturn dimmer to the left (east) of Jupiter.Alan Dyer / Universal Images Group via Getty Images file via NBC, December 9, 2020.

What kind of times are they, when

A talk about trees is almost a crime

Because it implies silence about so many horrors?                       

—Bertolt Brecht, “To those Born Later”

 

Thin ice limned the pond early this morning

and a slick of frost dazzled the green fields

yet pink blossoms still drifted across a few limbs

of the lone ornamental cherry tree.

In the slant of sun, the great blue heron stood

knee deep in water, and ducks have returned

among reflected shapes of pondside trees – 

bare branches outstretched like hands of penitents.

I have been arguing all evening with my friend

via email about Odysseus. He says Odysseus 

could have built that raft any time he wanted 

to escape from Calypso’s island, but I say not until

Athena persuaded Zeus to send Hermes down.  

I see Odysseus down by the seashore, weeping there,

as the great hexameters roll out in the receding waves.

Then we spar about the Suitors. They must be killed, 

he says, for their conspiracy. I ask, what about diplomacy?  

(It is Advent. The people are armed for insurrections here, 

spouting obscenities. “Sir, have you no sense of decency,” 

someone finally asked McCarthy, not so long ago.)  

My friend mentions Thersites. He has me there.

Jesus healed the blind man and asked him what he saw.

He said, “I see men like trees walking.”

Tonight I see two planets grow closer in the night sky.

(I have grown numb about the latest attacks

on civility.) Priam came for Hector’s body 

in the dead of night. Achilles welcomed him

and stopped the war for Hector’s funeral rites.

Recently I read about the Christmas truce in World War I

for the burial of the dead. Someone brought lights.

Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

       

Bonnie Naradzay's recent poems are in AGNI, the American Journal of Poetry, New Letters (Pushcart nomination), RHINO, Tar River Poetry, EPOCH, Tampa Review, Kenyon Review Online, Potomac Review, Xavier Review, and One Magazine. For many years she has led poetry workshops at a day shelter for the homeless and at a retirement center, both in Washington, DC.