The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus

X. The Chorus Line: Birth of Telemachus, An Idyll

Nine months he sailed the wine-red his mother’s blood

Out of the cave of dreaded Night, sleep,

Of troubling dreams he sailed

In his frail dark boat, the boat of

Through the dangerous ocean of his mother he sailed

From the distant cave where the men’s lives are spun,

Then measured, and then cut short

By the Three Fatal Sisters, intent o gruesome handcrafts,

And the lives of women also are two into the strand.

And we, the twelve who were later to his hand

At his father’s relentless command,

Sailed as well, in the dark frail boats ourselves

Through the turbulent seas of our sw and sore-footed mothers

Who were not royal queens, but a and piebald collection,

Bought, traded, captured, kidnapped I

serfs and strangers.

After the nine-month voyage we came shore,

Beached at the same time as he was, by the hostile air,

Infants when he was an infant, wailing as he wailed,

Helpless as he was helpless, but ten ti more helpless as well,

For his birth was longed-for and feasted our births were not.

His mother presented a princeling. Our various mothers

Spawned merely, lambed, farrowed, littered,

Foaled, whelped and kittened, brooded, hatched out their clutch.

We were animal young, to be disposed will,

Sold, drowned in the well, traded, used discarded when bloomless.

He was fathered; we simply appeared,

Like the crocus, the rose, the sparrows engendered in mud.

Our lives were twisted in his life; we all were children

When he was a child,

We were his pets and his toythings, me sisters, his tiny companions.

We grew as he grew, laughed also, ran ; ran,

Though sandier, hungrier, sun-speckled, most days meatless.

He saw us as rightfully his, for whatever purpose

He chose, to tend him and feed him, to wash him, amuse him,

Rock him to sleep in the dangerous boats of ourselves.

We did not know as we played with him there in the sand

On the beach of our rocky goat-island, close by the harbour,

That he was foredoomed to swell to our cold-eyed teenaged killer.

If we had known that, would we have drowned him back then?

Young children are ruthless and selfish: everyone wants to live.

Twelve against one, he wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Would we? In only a minute, when nobody else was looking?

Pushed his still-innocent child’s head under the water

With our own still-innocent childish nursemaid hands,

And blamed it on waves. Would we have had it in us?

Ask the Three Sisters, spinning their blood red mazes,

Tangling the lives of men and women together.

Only they know how events might then have been altered.

Only they know our hearts.

From us you will get no answer.