Sing, Muse

Sing, Muse, as you sang out for Homer once;
sing out the love of brothers bound by blood
not of their birth, their mother’s wails and grunts,
but of the miles they marched as one in mud,
of that they shed or that unleashed in flood.
Sing not of life beginning but of death,
and sing, O Muse, ‘til you run out of breath.

So Virgil heard you; so we hear you still
and give you yet more matter for your song.
Sing out, O Muse, and sing it with a will,
as if the soldier’s glory were as long
as yours, or made the stench of rot less wrong,
or gladdened mothers weeping out their eyes.
Let us console ourselves: Sing us these lies.

Sing out the old refrains of long-dead men
who were not safe, although they lived as kings.
We slaughter Iphigenia again,
and Clytemnestra’s waiting in the wings
until Orestes comes. Electra sings
for vengeance, and then wails as exiles do.
Sing out that song, O Muse—we know it, too.

For all your song is gilt atop our grief,
as on the horns of cattle sacrificed
we bless their blood with layers of gold leaf
and pray that all these countless deaths sufficed,
that somehow peace into their flesh was spliced
and if we set it free it will remain
so that these fleeting lives were not in vain.

Then sing, O Muse, yet louder than before
as once you sang for Homer: Of a home
that beckons still upon some farther shore.
We never have seen ours, but we have known
that somewhere mercy answers every groan
and there alone our endless wars will cease.
Sing out, O Muse, that someday we’ll have peace.

Muse, perhaps Clio, reading a scroll (Attic red-figure lekythos, Boeotia, c. 430 BC), Louvre Museum, Photo By Klügmann Painter - Jastrow (2006), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=668158