Antiphons of the Known World

Athena, coming onto me (verbatim transcription):

Every step you take will be the right one.

Women encouraged me like that:

Avoiding void, no one goes nameless in this world.

Power? I was the son of a king:

Hacking the armor from the limbs of the dying.

In the path of the blade of the plough I met God my foe:

Oh blight his voyage with trial and calamity.

All he needed was a taste of his own medicine:

The water was white with the blades of our oars.

Long-limbed Circe, the troubled, could only bring trouble:

Sure enough that month became a year.

Then Demodocus struck his lyre, and sang for me:

In that soft song I led one hundred lives.

I was young, singing such distance, when I set out:

The meters were my cloak, my map, my axe.

Declensions of the beasts defined my travels:

I made the lions purr; the lions licked my hands.

When gulls cry over rough water, home is close:

I remembered Charybdis the Swallower, in her magnificence.

Horizon-soaked, I sat and sobbed. Sunset. Shoulders shaking.

This was the liver’s dying, the world’s waking.