Watching Homer Struggle

Watching Homer struggle

to explain how a god wounded by a mortal

cannot die but may thereafter live with minor pain

and the humor when that god

complains to Jove that His supervision of His daughter

is inadequate and His Love too unconditional

while Diomed (or Tydides)

wreaks havoc on the Trojans and Hector

gives it back (in kind)

anatomically correct descriptions

of spears piercing jawbones and groins

sons without fathers hunting and fishing thereafter

alone. Written

amazingly presciently!

as a metaphor for Vietnam (our war)

forgotten consensually

as this generation slips lazily away

to Hades (on Huck Finn's raft)

where the lights are always blue, gentian actually,

supper's served at 4 and former adversaries

pass the heavy hanging time playing pinochle (and pool).

We're selling the house to pay the taxes.

Pallas Athena wars among the men

from the axle of her chariot

and Venus is injured by Diomed,

standing in the field of battle where she never should have been,

in her adorable hand.

What has this to do with Solomon in jail.

Not the Jewish king, a black American male,

same thing.

Your children can be failed at school and marched to war.

You can be taxed and sent to gaol for the honor of it.

anyone lived in a pretty how town.

We have no obligation

to perform the Iliad or read poems and even Homer

considers Achilles effete (compared to Hector)

and Odysseus is wrong even when he's right.

Therefore, modern man explores

the mathematics of circles in coordinate planes and their tangents

(when) (once) (soon)

the secret of warp speed is discovered

expansion of the species will be limitless and permanent.

Author's Note

--cummings, e.e., "anyone lived in a pretty how town", Complete Poems, 1904-1962, ed. George J. Firmage, Liveright Publishing Corp., 1973.