Dedicated to Brendan ‘An Dorcha’ Hughes
After the last ship on the Trojan Shore
departed, and prepared to be swallowed
by the horizon’s saphirus wound,
we stood there, and waited for nothing.
We,
who had set it sailing
pushing it off the sandbanks
when the wind could give only a dead breath,
watched,
as that lonely boat trailed
after a small forest of masts.
We,
who had shared the field
with the wrathful myrmidon,
and Ajax the bulwark,
were unable to articulate anything
except for battle cries
to puncture the silence
which that ship stretched with its voyage.
We,
who had spent our youth
in the protraction of combat
were too tired to wash
the ash off our skin
the smoke of the burning citadel
which hung on our shoulders as weighted scent.
The crimes we executed
stuck in our eyes like splinters
waiting to grow familiar with distance;
maybe it is better we stayed.
The ship has almost gone,
the sails have picked up a breeze,
that slowly drags
the possibility of return
beneath the Janus line of the sky,
as if home was a underworld
only encountered in death.
We,
who had been your comrades
still stand speechless
as if our voices had been a ventriloquism act
by some god or cause,
our vocal chords
like your bowstring,
waiting for you to strum us
into the swallow’s song
of violence.
But then,
as the ship truly begins its journey
I find the words:
Odysseus
please don’t leave us behind.
