[Newspoetry] For Helen or for Penelope

[DL Emerick]

For Penelope or for Helen:
Tortured Victims of Loves

The greatest poems of ancient Greece
detail how love starts and ends wars.
The politics of the State, of Fate,
depend on us, how we live for love.

There was always this Helen and
this staid husband and sober king,
and that guy who was a king's son,
young, pretty and playful, in love,
oh so very much in love were they,
he with her and she with him,
or else no eloping would occur --
so off to Troy they did flee,
seeking an asylum lovers need,
to trystate together mad love,
when others express bitter doubt
that any love is worth so much,
that it exceeds all other values,
even when massed and combined.

But war pursued them, in its hate.
When that long war was bitterly over,
there was yet this other love abandoned,
this love left back home alone,
this love left untended, unguarded.

Oh sure, Penelope was ever faithful,
a pretty wife long left alone,
for years,for decades and beyond,
in the prime of her loving life;
oh, how many other guys had her,
or had someone reputedly like her,
faithful for years, and years, alone,
or almost alone, except at night,
when lonely beds are cold as death,
and no love wants to die alone,
not when she burns to be loved.

When Ulysses came home, secretly,
lovers were swarming about Penelope,
buzzing like Camus's stranger flies,
but louder, more noisily, gossipy,
buzzing like flies about shit.

Ulysses sees what the scene is,
as cavorting across middle seas,
he more than once was faithless;
yes, he thinks to test Penelope,
who has mastered so many men,
and yet knows some modesty
will win her husband back,
(she knows who he is at once).
Some coyness in faking of it,
will make him think well of her,
despite the bodies of evidence
that lie all about Ithaca,
all about Ulysses home they lie,
they feast as her guests on him.

Well, as over in distant Troy,
no truth tellers were left alive,
there were no survivors to speak,
not here in haughty Ithaca either,
may the true ways of love be told.

No one writes for Penelope,
as no one writes for Helen,
to say what bastards they were,
those Greeks who loved their wars
more than they loved their wives.
The victors write their histories,
but the victims right those lies
when at last truth ever comes out.