At the Walls of Troy

 by Brett Rutherford

Have you found Troy? Colossal walls, impregnable,

once fashioned here to rise and fall a dozen times,

fell for their last, gate opened in fatal error.

Do your hear clash of arms, the din of bronze on bronze

(oh deadly iron, you slept then, as yet unor’d

beneath the blood-red earth, unknown to Hephaestus!)

How the chariots rolled, crushing the spent arrows,

driving the gore-spewn breastplates and skull’d helmets down

into the mire and muck of the ungrass’d field,

rolled right on in, to triumph after sleight’s success!

Dare you to stand without a shudder, where a god —

— Yea! even a goddess — reeled and bled out ichor

as Diomedes thrust and thrust impudent metal

with the clear sight of reason — the perfect warrior

granted of all men the vision to mark and wound

the very gods themselves as they sat invisible

beside their chosen heroes. Apollo stopped him:

woe to the hand that ever again hurled a spear

at an Olympian! If ever a warrior

asks why the gods should condone war, avert your eyes!

Did you find that high parapet from which the Greeks

hurled Priam’s last infant son to a bone-crush ruin

so that no son’s son would one day raid fair Hellas?

Do cries still echo here of the wail of the Trojan

women — some doomed to the swift sword or self-murder

vainly offering their jewelry as ransom —

some chosen, war’s prize, for transport and servitude,

already-raped captives whose usurp’d wombs erase

the name of Troy? A place with all its women gone

is a place for dogs and vultures, without a name.

Have you found Troy? ’Mid all this dust and ruin,

can you raise one ghost from all the thousand warships

to ask him the why of this past and present misery,

the cause for fighting and dying so far from home?

Agamemnon hears you not. Menelaus went pale

when stories of the great war were told in Sparta.

Some of that scattered gray ash might be Patroclus.

You, with bowed head, recited from Homer and wept

as ghosts gave shout and answered why they went:

To see again the radiant face of Helen.

8/21/2021