No Gods, no Heroes,

only women and Hector

The misdirected vengeance of Hera.

Grey-eyed Athena’s wrath and jealousy,

and Dionysus, bringer of merciless punishment –

(feral mother ripping the limbs from her son, unknowingly,

but when awakened, an internal bonfire grief

beyond extinguishing.)

Hector was the only noble hero –

shouldering his course and obeying his love.

Crafty Odysseus tossed baby-Astyanax from the towers of Troy.

Crazed Achilles knew only the fury of his passion as he

flooded Scamander with the cut-up corpses of his mad rage.

Ajax the Great impaled himself in service to his affronted ego,

and Ajax the Lesser – a coward rapist of the prophet pure Cassandra.

Give me one-eyed blindness, stay on the path, past

Hecuba and her wild rivers of unfathomable suffering – childless

when once a mother of many, Queen of an honoured realm.

Give me Electra over Hera with her young-woman’s devotion

and subterranean heart, tied to a father that would have killed

her as he did sister-Iphigenia

on the pyre-offering of war, victory and fame.

Give me a settled glory – my God of Mercy instead of candles, Jesus

instead of Apollo’s thick sensuous thighs or golden curls,

demanding matricide of Orestes.

Give me Helen in her betrayal of red-haired Menelaus, Helen,

daughter of the Swan, lover of pretty-boy Paris, Helen,

mascot and scapegoat of war, but never the cause.

Give me Clytemnestra over Agamemnon, daughter

too of the Swan, bearer of a mother’s authentic wound -

Iphigenia lost on the bloody rock

by obeyer-of-Zeus, mighty-father

Agamemnon’s royal hand.

Zeus, kind only to sycophants,

Zeus, serial adulterer, user of woman,

sire of many children, lusting as the sunlight lusts

for Earth, to seep warmth into her crust

and heat up the whole of her surface,

demanding offspring life.

Give me Penelope over

teller-of-tall-tales, Cyclops-outwitter,

slaughter-of-suitors Odysseus.
Penelope, with her patient intelligence weaving,

unweaving, keeper of fidelity

for twenty years, holding her own

up against the plight of a woman’s, even a Queen’s,

accepted inequality.

Give me poor Io, chased in her heifer-frame

from flat plains to cliff ridges

to Prometheus’s cursed crucifixion to

finally a resting point in Ethiopia –

Poor Io, ancestor of the brute-blooded Hercules,

who claimed madness-by-Hera turned him

into a murderer of his wife and sons,

who was no Hector, only

undefeated.

Give me Andromache’s zodiac-fingerprint,

for she held Hector inside the cavity of her loins,

and he loved her, and they both knew

happiness.

© Allison Grayhurst 2020