Elegy for Charixenus

by Brett Rutherford

     Adapted from Meleager, The Greek Anthology, vii, 468

Not eighty, not sixty, not forty,
not thirty even, fit age
for marrying, not even twenty!
Eighteen, Charixenus, dead!
Dressed in your chlamys
by your own mother, not
off for a prize, not off to a war,
     not off to a wedding day:
instead a woeful gift
     to hungry Hades.

I swear the earth shook,
     the stones groaned
as all his best friends
bore out his body
and all the house wailed.

So grieved were they
     who carried him,
their sobbing shook
the emblazoned bier.

Led by the baffled priests
    his parents chanted
a song of mourning,
a plea for swift passage
to a blessed place.

No one glanced up
as though to see the shame
of the indifferent sky
would drive all mad.

Alas for the mother’s breasts
that suckled in vain,
for the father whose line
might now be extinguished.

Did some old oath
    bring Furies here,
three evil maids
who revel in death?
Or, born of Night
    and Erebus
did Fates foredoom
this unhappy youth?
O Fates implacable,
barren yourselves you spit
to four winds the love
of mother for her first-
    and only-born.

How can the morrow
resemble the yesterday?
Friends, parents,
(and one, an unknown
lover, who pines for him),
their futures canceled.

Who will not hear
this tale and pity
the left-behind?
Grief pulls all down
to a common grave.