Tuesday’s Song
Illuminate this hand, Muse,
To write a song of arms
For Men, exiles of Fate.
For this beginning will occur again…
Oh Muse! Sing.
Sing, oh Zeus,
The Wrath of Peleus
(a man)
Named Achilles
That since the siege of Troy
Was lastly ceased
Trod no more upon green earth
[as Heaney]
We were killing pigs
When the Americans arrived
And the gods have said unto us ever since,
“Say you not that Death assail you?
Pray you not for Death’s own End?
But when you die
We thus say unto you
[as a whisper]
Our children!
When you die,
Is it not Death that dies with you?”
Ever you have fought
The war that is born
When war is dead.
You will bathe in Heaven
With blood spilled in Hell
[as Frost]
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
For brother has rained
A wrath like God’s
Upon his brother,
And thus it has been.
This world forever born
In the circular contingency
Of wounded Time.
Of All the Gods I Sought to See
Of all the gods I sought to see
The Eye, open, backwards-all peering.
But I was told:
“There are no gods.”
Thus remembrance is folly and
The matter of memory is but
The birthright of becoming.
To see,
To see
That the endlessness of the species
Is borne upon the death of the body,
Water bound and taut over bone
And muscle.
Rippled is the water by the ebb and flow
Of some eldritch moon’s
Gravitational whims,
In the forgetfulness of the gods,
Be they dead or even if they never
Were at all.
Yamil Maldonado Pèrez was born in Puerto Rico, where he currently resides. He studies in the University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras campus where he majors in Philosophy and Comparative Literature. His main interest lies in the processes that underlie the evolution of mythology, Christianity in particular.
