4
Nothing moves swifter than the knowledge of death.
King Amphion, Niobe’s consort, had spied the cloud
and shivered as he stood beneath it, powerless.
He could not make out in the tumult below,
just who was slaying whom and why, for his eyes
with age were failing him. The shouting and screams
roared into the palace, up stairs and into his rooms
where he was wont to linger with laws and testaments.
The one who told him could not get the words.
“How many dead?” King Amphion demanded.
“All seven, sire!” — “All seven what?” — “Your sons!
All dead in the span of minutes from vengeful arrows.”
“No man can bear such grief and live!” cried Amphion,
and taking the messenger’s own sword, he slew himself.
Enter Niobe, to the blood-stained chamber
where she hardly noticed her perish’d consort.
At the heavens she raged, inconsolable.
The women veiled themselves in pity
as the disheveled Queen removed herself
to the corpse-ridden playing field. None envied her
now, and all who had exalted her, averted their faces.
One by one, she threw herself upon the bodies
of her seven sons engored; with blood she smeared
her raiment, and it stained her face and hair.
Each pair of dead lips she kissed with her own,
last echo of a mother’s first infant blessing.
She lifted bruised arms, all bronzed with gore
to the never-moving storm-cloud, then turned
her face toward where Latona’s temple stood,
hurling her imprecation so loud the very walls
of Thebes were shocked, and trembled.
“Feast now upon my grief, Latona, cruel
beyond the imagination of Tartarus,
feast and glut your heart with my sorrow.
It is endless — it will feed you forever!
Seven sons now I must burn and bury,
sevenfold my suffering. Exult, victorious
only in hatred. Your named shall be cursed
as the by-word for cruelty. Feast then,
and fill your empty heart with my sorrow.
“But, ha! your victory is not a victory.
My misery is greater still than your contentment
off in that place where no one knows your name.
Who will come to your temple now? Doors boarded
up, its walls leaning every which way, in years
to come it will be a ruin, a chicken-coop.
“After so many deaths, I triumph still!
Seven sons gone, I still have seven daughters!”
5
The day advanced, and dusk drew near. Cut trees
and timbers carried forth from the city took shape
into seven hastily-made biers, and the seven sisters,
robed in black, their faces smeared with weeping,
gathered around the scene of horror. All heard
the sky-shaking throb of the bowstring on high,
and one, while drawing out the arrow from inside
her brother’s raven-torn innards, toppled dead
before any saw that a missile had stricken her.
Some thought she merely fainted, but others saw
the pulsing flow of blood beneath her.
Another as she stood next her grieving mother
was cut down just as suddenly. Dim light
and enfeebl’d sight made some assume
the daughters were passing out with grief.
Latona’s daughter died before her, lips clenched,
without a word of reproach or a farewell cry.
One tried to flee, hoping her robes of black
would vanish into twilight. So she fell too,
and her sister, hard upon her, tumbled down
and both, in a heap, were arrowed, expiring.
One hid, but from the overarching cloud
there was no shelter; she fell,
defiant, until the angry shaft toppled her.
Now six had suffered wounds, and bleeding,
died. Niobe raced to her last daughter’s side.
The girl crouched, and Niobe tried to drape
her blood-stained robe to cover her.
Niobe screamed to the heavens again. “Latona!
Or you who come to slaughter in Latona’s name!
Just leave me one, the smallest, she is nothing
to you, my last vestige on earth. The littlest
one I beg you to spare me! Just one!” Yet even
as she prayed for the mercy of the implacable,
another shaft fell, sure aimed, rending her robe
and killing the hidden, crouching girl beneath it.
6
Now sits Niobe, childless truly, amid the gore
of fourteen slaughtered children, the sons on biers,
the daughters scattered in bloody pools
as wolf and dog, crow and raven, red-eyed
begin their death caw, the taste for flesh
that attends every battlefield. None dare to move,
except to melt away to their darkened homes,
where, hearths extinguished, the Thebans sat
sleepless and transfixed with terror.
Niobe sees the bier she had not noticed:
the self-slain Amphion from whom no sons
or daughters more could issue, fate sealed
upon Niobe’s curse forever. Silence was all
amid the creeping night, the ominous wingbeats
of carrion seekers. What horror at dawn
when the night’s feasting would be revealed!
Sun rises on the unpeopled field of Mars.
The birds are at their business. A wary wolf
circles the motionless Niobe.
Her hair, a mass of blood clots, does not move.
There is no breeze to stir it. Her face grows pale
as though her own blood had gone to ground.
Her eyes are fixed on nothing, She does not stir.
Aside from her, the picture is void of human life. Eyes
frozen, tongue locked in roof of mouth, teeth
clenched on final horror, she weeps. She weeps.
She wills her neck to bend — it disobeys;
she orders her arms to move, but they will not.
Her legs and feet are frozen. Slowly her heart,
the proud heart and all her innards, petrify.
She is nothing but a rockpile in woman’s form,
but still she weeps, tears of their own accord
flow out and down the semblance of face.
During the night that followed, some gods
took pity and lifted the weeping Niobe on high
dropping her back to a hillside in Phrygia,
where she weeps still, and forever,
a perpetual spring in a wall of limestone,
Who learns not from the lessons of punished Pride
must pay the toll of sorrow and extinction!
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