What Helen Saw in the Funeral Pyre

I am a classics nerd (so I hope I got most of the details right) and I had a great time writing the poem.

The bright tongues had slowed their dance

and the crackling tunes

long after the soaring embers finished their dalliance

above the blood-stained dunes.

 

Whilst the black ships were beached

the wind blew across the walls of Sea and Sun

to silence the prayers women had beseeched

and far away Thetis mourned her son.

 

Hecuba beat her breast

and Helen ponders the fire

in which belovèd Hector’s rest

amongst embers as was his father’s desire.

 

Andromache cradles her Scamandrius

and weeps over her husband’s new bed,

a lonely bed, a dead bed, pathetic and glorious

but suddenly her eyes flashed, dumbfounded.

 

She howled with the terror of a mad beast

or some God-struck oracle,

then she hid her child in her breast,

and she fled into Athena’s temple.

 

She rends the robes and sacred offerings

at the feet of the Goddess’ marble idol until her maids

restrain her and silence her prophetic cryings,

exclaiming she’d become mad as Cassandra who tears her braids.

 

Helen, aghast, asks what vision did she see in the pyre?

In the bloody red flames and acrid smoke?

Helen wondered at Andromache, the stared into the fire,

and her haughty courage broke!

 

The logs whose bone-white bark flakes

rippled and writhed over molten bronze veins;

becoming the scales of hordes of winged drakes

whose gaping maws spewed sulfurous smoke and flames.

 

The serpentine drakes rose above Hector,

like the terrible, nemean lion Achilles,

and swallowed his bubbling flesh while his armor

fell to the bottom of the pit and his shade fled to Hades.

Helen saw Troy’s walls crumble,

Priam upon an altar with his throat slit,

and the drakes gorging on his blood while lying rubble,

growing grotesque and fat like Laestrygonians while a new pyre was lit.

 

Helen fled from the dreadful vision

of Drakes and Troy’s holocaust

not because she would die with Priam’s children,

but because her name was not amongst the lost.

 

Helen’s shade shouted but she remained silent,

and she climbed to the topmost bastion of the mightiest wall

bellow her feet she could feel the violent

moment of stillness just before the stones begin to fall.

 

She knew her fate was spun,

the face that launched a thousand ships

would not be swallowed when Menelaus won,

she must survive an apocalypse.

 

She knew her lot was the shortest

and that she must be witness to a massacre

the Goddesses had willed her to cause in jealous contest,

but she would have to murky Lethe to cloud her memories most macabre.

 

The sun rose over Illum’s plains,

and Helen saw the taunting Draken scales

rippling as shining bronze, an army soon to be howling with pains

that would be told centuries later in blind songs and tales.