Dialogue (Harmodius and Anacreon)

by Brett Rutherford

1

Harmodius, to Anakreon:

Unread, your latest scroll

its seal unbroken, too.

At noon, I send my servant hag

to hurl your scroll,

wrapped up with this one,

over your garden wall.

How passers-by will laugh

to see a withered crone

asking the neighbors

which gate belongs to you.

They’ll say Anakreon

now plunders graves

as well as cradles.

Shamed now perhaps,

you will stop those ardent letters.

Don’t put my name in your poems.

Don’t ask me to read them.

Don’t pay to have them sung

at your next banqueting.

You’re nothing but trouble for me.

You could be my uncle,

my father, even —

so no more loving glances, ever!

2

Anakreon to Harmodius:

Cupid’s bent arrows cannot return.

Cruel one, our secret is out.

My passion is over

before its egg could hatch.

I did not name you, or confess it.

“Which one,” they asked, “would Zeus,

or the fool-poet Anakreon, love best!”

You huffed about, and blushed, and preened

so much that all my readers put

two and two together and linked our names.

You did not mind my admiration

you did not mind my poems, even.

Now that your brass-faced vanity

refuses me and scorns my gifts,

I am not bound by modesty.

Henceforth I wear the badge of love

not in the heart-held lining

but on the sleeve for all to see.

Let people judge who is the baser fool:

I, the unloved lover, or you,

the worthless object of a great Desire!

— Revised 2026. 

Burnt Offering

 

by Brett Rutherford

Anacreon, to Harmodius:

About that letter, the fervent one,

the one you hinted you’d sell

unless I enriched your coffers —

you mocked its shaky autograph,

and threatened a scandal —

I know your threat is false.

Last night in my sleep I saw

your hands on a crumpled scroll,

the thrust toward a sputtering lamp,

the tiny screams as my words,

my awesome and unrepeatable vows,

my praise of your unworthy beauty,

collapsed and withered in a blue-green flame.

You brushed the ashes from your gentle arms —

they scattered, mingled with dust motes,

rode a moonbeam in a moment’s leap

toward ghosthood, then dissipated.

Only one moth, before its suicide,

dipped in the ash and shared

one final taste of my missive.

No Phoenix rose, the earth

did not open to swallow you,

and your disdainful triumph

did not diminish the cosmos.

Yet he who burns love-letters

offends the Gods.

You dare undo my holy madness

with your little hecatomb

of paraffin and oil?

They will come back to sting you,

my salamander syllables.

Try and love anyone now! Your sunken cheeks

and pale complexion will drive all away.

All will know you are pursued and haunted.

You will wish you had kept the living scroll

when you see how Love, an ash-faced Fury,

comes back from Acheron,

a broom-hag to drive

your other suitors off,

nightmare’s bedmate, engendering

alarming sores and bruises,

leaving you spent and exhausted

as though a nest of incubi

used you to train their young.

You gloated first, I had composed

a shameful letter, and I would pay.

But when you learned

my missives wind up

in the best anthologies,

you gloated again

to burn it.

In vain,

your destruction of evidence.

You see,

I always keep a copy.

— Revised 2026.

The Conference

by Brett Rutherford

Atop a mountain hunting lodge,
amid boar-heads
and many-antlered deer,
in a sunny eagle-eyrie
with barrels of wine and beer,
the best of the best have assembled.

As always, the group of nondescript
officials lean in
upon a pile of folders and documents.
Each has composed a part
of the whole, without divining what
the leader really had in mind —

Him, the one at the table’s head.
The unapproachable one
whose decisions are always right
without or without their labors!

At the great man’s right, one says,
to open the topic at hand:
They are not like us, you see.
They are primitive. The one
on the great man’s left intones:
No manner of education can fix them.

One by one, they chime on in.
Who knows that gods they really worship?
Their women breed like rabbits.
Times past, in these very forests,
we hunted Gypsies for sport —
     so why not these ones?
Has even one of them composed
a symphony or written a novel —
not without fraud, I assure you!

The world will be glad
     when we are rid of them.

One near the head of the table
opens his binder and indicates
the page to which they all must turn.

We can do this, he says,
The Americans have shown us the way.
Their Indians are almost gone,
and will soon be exterminated.

They get down to strategies
and tactics. A fund
has already been allotted.
Troops here. And here.
The border sealed.
Boxcars and trucks
are at the ready.

At the table’s far end
the moustache rises,
then falls — a smile!

2
Sometimes the room
is in a palace,
sometimes a sunny eyrie
atop a mountain hunting lodge,
sometimes a high-tech bunker
a-blink with lights and monitors.

Always, the same kind of men
hunch over their binders.
They have lists.
As went the Indians,
Armenians, and Jews,
Romana and homosexuals,
now go the rest of them.

They do not look one another
eye-to-eye. For each has a list,
and the other is on it.

Note: This poem was suggested by the Wahnsee Conference. On January 20, 1942, Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the details were unveiled for the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” I have moved the location to a hunting lodge.

 

Into the Ashen Night

 

by Brett Rutherford

I know we said we’d never —

but for a moment today

we passed a foot apart

on the angry pavement,

sun in your eyes,

the snow in mine.

The edges of our shadows touched,

an overlap of gray penumbras.

Late slant of sun upon my desk,

the lamp turned on, beam-glance

from the glass framed portrait

I have not brought myself

to hide away or burn —

too many shadows! I want to write.

My shadow dips down to page

with its own pen.

I hesitate.

It gets there first,

mocks my writing

with almost invisible ink,

my fountain-pen aslant

with most peculiar penmanship

in a nearly-forgotten tongue:

Ne sors pas dans la nuit cendrée,

sous l'ombre de la lune —

évite ce lieu hanté

où un fantôme ressuscité

chante pour lui-même!

Dans son sang-froid,

la rouille rouge

et une corrosion noire

coulent.

Son œil cyclopéen

aspire tout sur lui-même,

son iris

un abîme d'onyx...

Oh, the horrors that the heart withholds!

* * *

Translation:

O go not forth into the ashen night,

beneath the shadow of the moon —

avoid that haunted place

where a risen ghost sings to itself!

In its cold blood, red rust

and black corruption flow.

Its Cyclopean eye

draws all into itself,

its iris an abyss of onyx...

— Revised 2026. Originally titled, “Contact.”

Who Can Be A Poet All of the Time? (2026 revision)

by Brett Rutherford

Who can be a poet all the time?

The sons of rich fathers,

remittance men —

spinster heiresses with hyacinth hair,

filling long sheets with

delicate verse —

the wrinkled don retired at last

to his monument of sonnets —

the very young — the truly mad —

the Muse-possessed

(not just visited, inhabited

by the poem-urge) —

But for the rest of us,

being a poet

is at best an illusion,

at worst a vice.

A thing of glory, certainly.

Honor or profit?

not in this age!

Against those professionals,

we migrant poets must distill

into a hundred poems,

the brandy of their thousands,

lift up our frail mimosa leaves

beneath their sky-

consuming oaks.

Vast tomes they fill,

prose interrupted

by spasms of the ENTER key,

or blocks of text

that seem the stuff of Bedlam.

They are at it, day and night.

The mail truck groans

with their outgoing manuscripts.

They teach this stuff.

Honest to God, they are paid to do it!

They sniff at one

another’s résumés.

Their blurbs adorn

one other’s jackets.

They are weighted down with medals.

If you sleep with one,

you can be a contest-winner!

Young rivals beware:

they trample their peers,

for something called “tenure.”

The rest of us

must steal these hours,

scrawl debtors’ ink

on dime-store paper,

consort with the Muse

as though adulterous,

secret as those frenzies

in the alleys of Sodom

between the angels

and the damned.

In the anvil world we live in

we are impractical, slothful,

lounging for adjectives

when we should be “working,”

shouting our newfound lines

against the surf,

to the dead in graveyards,

to the indifferent grackles

on our window ledge —

absolutely useless, this

rootless, anti-

Puritan-ethic obsession —

Except that for these moments,

freely given,

we would nothing trade,

knowing that those who follow us

would forfeit fortunes, too,

for such a poetic seizure,

would trade a life of ease

for a mouthful of words,

the words that come as though

a thunder-god had uttered them.

—Revised 2026

Dead Poets

by Brett Rutherford

Thirteen thousand lady poets,

Poe said,

gave all their verse away —

no wonder he starved!

Too many poets,

that’s the problem!

too many living

poets,

not enough glory fodder

to feed us!

What’s a poet to do?

Become a Dead Poet!

It’s a guaranteed path

to glory, fame and im-

mortality!

There’s the Memorial Reading.

Your friends will come.

Writers who barely knew you

pen verse in your honor.

Then, finally, you appear

in the best anthologies —

something about closed brackets

around your years

seems to appeal to editors.

Critics discover you

(they never feed on anything living)

repeat your words

and have their way with your meaning —

no one cries rape

when words are ravished.

It matters little that your neighbors

have forgotten you —

already the next tenant

shops for oven cleaner,

new tools in the garage.

Oblivious traffic hums on the bridge

you leapt from.

It does not count

that everyone you slept with

is bedding down

with the worst surviving haiku-ists,

that even your best beloved

has put your books in the cellar —

what’s temporal fame

when someone can write

a doctoral thesis

on your use of caesura,

your bittersweet alliteration?

So do it quick —

perish and publish!

When the last petal

on the only wreath

that graced your grave

is borne away

on a winter wind,

your time will come!

— Revised 2026

The Old Gravestones

Pioneer cemetery in Edinboro, PA

 

by Brett Rutherford

Names last, dates fade, deeds disappear.

Try if you will to read these stones —

earth clots around inscriptions,

moss rubs like moist eraser.

Even in best light you cannot read

their rhymes of what heavens they earned

or paid that others should think so.

Stonemason’s script rubs down to worm-lines,

elegant esses and effs are mere wrinkles.

Would anyone know if the stones were swapped,

if pious spinster’s stone became confused

with an outcast wench’s marker,

if brides and grooms and stillborn babes

exchanged their names and families,

half-breed with minister,

hermit with midwife?

What a terrible stew at Resurrection

if these stones were needed,

carried like credit cards

to the last communion!

Even the wind, and wind-borne waters,

shorn of the lake and incontinent clouds

work bald forgetfulness in granite,

sandstone erased, slate shorn by frost and thaw.

Easy to read BORN.

Born is everywhere.

Born as we all are,

but when is gradually erased.

Zeros and eights and nines

curve into shallow depressions,

sevens and ones to cuneiform,

thin lines and gashes.

Easy to read DIED

but isn’t that obvious?

Death dates and Aetat ages

wink out in wind-rub.

A few are blank,

carved and waiting

for sleepers who never came.

(Fought in a war —

no body was found —

went to the city —

ran for a freight train —

or just plain never died?)

Names. The names linger.

Eye leaps from letter to letter,

fills in the biblical

and well-known names.

The sculpted angels are armless now,

the stones once faced

with weeping-willow carvings

are horizontal.

Some have been propped back up

on broken pediments

with bolts and metal braces.

Do they toss in their sleep?

Do stones fly up

like lumpy pillows,

tilt down

to shade unhappy eyes?

I too would turn

if line by line

and page by page

the universe erased me!

—Revised 2026

A Review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

by Brett Rutherford

Christopher Nolan’s film is a triumph, a milestone in the history of ancient-world epics.

A translator of The Odyssey (Emily Wilson), whose work Nolan admired and claimed as an inspiration, has condemned the script and the acting in rather insulting terms, even as interest in the film is driving the sales of her translation up into Harry Potter land.

The slug-like creature known as Elon Mollusk has offered to make his own AI-generated version of The Odyssey, suggesting that Mel Gibson might direct it. All to correct the supposed DEI and “woke” components of the script and casting.

I am myself a captive creature of the classics, having adapted a number of classic Greek poets, and having authored a long poem that is a prequel to The Iliad. I have read various English translations of both epics, and I prefer Lattimore for The Iliad and Fitzgerald for The Odyssey. A peek at Wilson’s translation did not stir me. Therefore I offer the following disconnected comments about The Odyssey from a vantage of great familiarity with the literature and its tradition.

Surprise! I was thrilled and delighted with Nolan’s film.

It is not a linear or literal adaptation of Homer’s poem. Even compressed, that would take maybe 24 hours, or a mini-series running three seasons. What this film offers instead is the heart of The Odyssey’s plot and many of its characters, as re-purposed and re-imagined by a film-maker with a brain of his own, and many points to make about our present-day world, and our own nation’s obsession with war.

The swash-buckling hero of the sword-and-sandal films, this Odysseus is not. He is a war veteran with PTSD, memory loss, drug addiction, and a dread of going home where a line of widows and orphans would meet him on the dock and demand to know what happened to their sons and brothers. For that, he has no answer. He has lost every single man, some in battle at Troy, and the rest in calamities on the war home.

In several flashbacks to the fall of Troy, Odysseus is seen as becoming a passive observer of the carnage his clever invention of the Trojan Horse has brought upon the fallen city. He sees women and children cut down in the streets. The King of Kings of the Greeks, Agamemnon, passes through the gates of Troy in the guise of Darth Vader.

There are no gods in this film. The “Athena” who keeps appearing to counsel him is not the goddess, but one of his shell-shock hallucinations. She is, in fact, an apparition of a priestess of Athena he saw beheaded at Troy. You might have to see the film twice to realize this.

There are monsters in this film, oh yes. A terrific Cyclops who devours humans head first in a direct imitation of the Goya painting Saturn Devouring His Children. The witch Circe is a man-hater, turning house-guests into pigs until she is persuaded by Odysseus to change her ways (the year of sex between witch and warrior are omitted). The whirlpool and hydra-like monster, and the giants, are the stuff of nightmares, and Nolan, not employing AI in any way, uses full size models and various tricks of photography to pull of the remarkable episodes.

Now here I want to digress about these monster stories. The Odyssey begins in “Homer’s” voice, as an omniscient narrator, but all the stories of the mishaps involving enchantresses and monsters, are related by Odysseus himself while he is a guest at dinner. They are table talk bardic episodes. The places and creatures did not exist, and no Greek had ever seen a Cyclops. Odysseus is a cunning man, a trickster, and perhaps a desperate liar because he cannot in any other way account for the loss of his men. None of them, not one, returned from Troy.

The reason I dwell on this is that Nolan gives us Odysseus’s most outlandish tall tale, that of his and his crew’s journey to Hades, through a mysterious “back door” far to the North (Iceland, it seems.) This scene reduced me to rubble. It is unsettling and terrifying, especially to a poet.

Nolan has Odysseus and his men make a hasty retreat from Hades, pursued by the shades of the unburied dead of Ithica. In Homer’s original tall-tale, Odysseus meets more and more famous Greeks going back to the earliest times. He never explains how he recognizes all these ghosts as they approach him to talk, and he stops himself and apologizes to his host. He has overstepped the human and is on over his depth.

What I believe Nolan has perceived, correctly, is that Odysseus has lied his way home, a broken man, and that, once in Ithaca he would have only his tall tales to justify his long absence. Nolan has the hero relate each of these “tales” to Calypso as recovered memories. Which cannot be trusted.

Odysseus’s flashback to Troy is his Oppenheimer moment. Nolan has worked the whole story to bring us here. It is not about ancient Greeks. It is about us. It is about every broken-down veteran in a doorway. It is about the soldier asked to go through the gates of a strange city and kill on sight. It is about the invention of monsters where none exist.

This is a masterpiece of cinema. A masterpiece of story-telling. An experience that will linger for years in the minds of viewers.

I am sorry that classicists are offended. I am sorry that Greeks are offended, claiming that a universal classic belonging to all humankind can be "culturally appropriated" – rubbish!

I am sorry that the film did not have a more high-toned script with more literary language. I did not like Telemachus call his father his “Dad.” That was the director’s choice.

I am sorry that most audiences will not have the context to understand why the Trojan War started, what preceded the fall of Troy, and, hence its effect on those who sacked it. The Odyssey is a sequel, the greatest sequel ever. The violation of hospitality when a prince of Troy stole Helen, the wife of Menelaus, triggered the ten-year siege.

Hades, soon enough, will be full of critics quarreling over Nolan’s Odyssey. The food down there consists mostly of sour cherries, which should suit them.

Twenty-Year New Yorker, After His Exile

by Brett Rutherford

Though I thought I had shed it,
this city has grown on me,
my head-top
soaring amid the
clouds, fingers
outstretched
toward the harbor goddess.

I am all of it —
luster and greed,
poet and dreamer —
landlords unnamed in tinsel-gold
lording it over the Lorca slums —
infant stock brokers
in twin baby prams,
their nanny pushing past
doorways where tattooed
squatter punks rage — the towers
and their polished atriums
clean and classic for an Age of Silver —

cameras watch everything, as bulky men
in blue uniforms eye multiples screens
for back-packed likely suspects, yet eyes
avert from the darkened outer avenues
whose concrete canyons smoke
with suppressed resentment.

I can be all and celebrate all,
make my inkwell of the
things you dare not think of:
the crumbling infraworld
of steam pipes that, bursting,
cook office workers like
lobsters, the rivets and spikes
that loosen beneath the wheels
of the subway, the furtive shadow
that gives itself in doorways
to random takers.

This is Atlantis, Babel, Gomorrah and Tyre,
The Temple of Dendur, Tyrannosaur,
Ming, Ch’ing and Tang ceramic
Carnegie Hall, the Opera, the Symphony,
the thunder-thump of 1812 in the Park.
The nights of undulating ecstasy
sparking still in a hundred thousand eyes
in the city that will not sleep
and will not surrender its secret yearnings,
the pagan embrace of gods in underwear
towering over neon flesh amphitheatre,
Times Square unsquaring America
into Dionysian dervish naked dancing.

I am the weed-lot strewn with mattress springs,
the chaste fountains of Lincoln Center,
the pride of the library lions on Fifth Avenue.
Long-legged Athena strides here in the sunlight —
behind her, a meth Medusa beckoning.
Forward or backward? Where will this city go?
Where its inhabitants?
Jack hammers and dynamite
remake my countenance,
revise my profile.
I am always fleeing this city to save my soul.
I am always coming back
to make it anew in marble.

          —

Revised 2026

Arabesques on The Statue of Liberty (2026 Version)

 by Brett Rutherford

1

Bad Dingo rides

the Staten Island ferry dusk till dawn,

clinging to rail,

nestling an all-night tumescence,

hard at the sight of the robed lady,

vast, unapproachable.

He’s stalking her.

He bides his time.

Some night

there’d be a fog,

a power failure.

He’d come up behind her,

he’d prod the small

of her spine

with his imperious knife,

jostle her bronze buttocks

with his ardent flesh-prod.

She’d drop the tablet;

the torch would sputter.

He’d push her off her pedestal.

Bad Dingo would give it to her good

the way he did to other white ladies

in parks and stairwells and subway cars.

This would be the rape of all rapes,

the pinnacle of his career,

the ultimate boast:

“See that goddess

flat on her back in the harbor —

she ain’t so proud now

since someone had her,

made her moan.

Bad Dingo had her,

stuck it to the Statue,

white lady Liberty!”

2

In Chinatown,

Mrs. Wang mounts

a quiet

rebellion

against the ways of the elders.

She has done all

her mother asked her:

married the boy

the matchmaker ordained,

bore sons and daughters

in regular order,

burned joss and incense

at every altar

sent ghost gold and peaches,

phantom cars and televisions,

Hong Kong Hell dollars

to the teeming, greedy dead.

Now her husband travels,

has mistresses, won’t talk

about his gambling.

Her children are gone,

married to foreign devils.

Her round-eyed grandchildren

will not learn Mandarin,

nor will they send joss wealth

to her once she is dead.

A dream-voice told her, "Live,

and make each day

count as a year."

So she becomes a whirlwind,

sells off her jade and porcelain,

cleans out the savings account,

her husband knew nothing about

buys an airline ticket for San Francisco —

and after that, who knows?

She pawns the statuette

of pearly white Kuan-Yin,

the Goddess of Mercy

whose only blessing

was endless childbirth

and wash this, iron-that.

On a whim she buys another

to take its place at her bedside:

a foot-high Statue of Liberty

with batteries and glowing torch.

She leaves it for her husband,

her wedding ring

on its spiky crown.

3

Today two New York titans

switch places.

A grumpy Green Liberty

strides up Fifth Avenue.

She crushes pedestrians

in verdigris splatter.

Her sandaled feet

send buses flying,

kiosks shattering.

Her great head turns

among the office towers. She reaches in,

pulls screaming executives

through razor-edge panes,

undresses them

with her copper fingers,

discards them one by one

to the pavement

twenty stories below.

The man she wants

is not among them. He’s got

to be a real American,

one of those Arrow shirt models,

blond, and a screamer,

a yielding but unwilling male

under her stern metallic nails.

The more he'd cry outPut me down!

the more she would like him.

Uptown, she finds one —

a tousle-headed messenger,

Viking-blond and thin as a rail —

she scoops him up —

his empty bike totters

and is instantly stolen.

Imperious male that he is,

he bellows Put me down!

She cups him in one palm,

drops her tablet,

rolls up her sleeves,

and starts the painful ascent

of the Empire State Building.

Up there, they would be alone together.

She'd show him the top of the world.

Downtown

on Liberty Island,

a great ape replaces

the green goddess.

King Kong wields a torch,

incinerates all passing freighters,

inspects all passenger ships

to toss away all

who do not meet his standards.

He hurls great boulders skyward,

warns off incoming airplanes

with a shake of his might fists.

Homeland Security Kong,

appointed by the President himself,

he guards the harbor now.

He is a real American

and he shouts his slogans:

America First! Stay out!

Go home!

No foreigners allowed!

    — c. 1987, revised 2026