PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

Too well aware I am that Vergil died

with his Aeneid quite unfinished and---

so would Octavian have us believe---

unready for its publication; but

Octavian commanded Vergil's two

executors to publish with all speed

the poem just as it was.  And long have I,

reading it all the many times I have,

believed that some parts of it were not quite

exactly as Octavian had hoped.

But having boasted of the poem's greatness,

and then, before Vergil's corpse had grown cold,

Octavian demanded publication

without corrective gloss or emendation.

And Vergil's vision of what Rome must be

is not the City of reality,

or even of our recent history;

no, not the Rome Octavian bequeathed

to his heirs, and to theirs, and on and on.

I cannot finish my Achilleid;

I do not have sufficient time or strength

to write the myth as it should have been told,

not as Homer distorted it for his

sad tale of Troy.  Chiron the Centaur taught

Achilles and Patroclus about love,

and not about warfare.  Chiron observed

those two beautiful adolescents' need

to be together---as pupils of his

wisdom, and as boyfriends become lovers

in intimacy; whereby pleasures that

their bodies could provide---pleasures exchanged,

explored, and (most important of all) shared)---

would bring their souls into convergence and

forever couple them together.  This,

alas, is not for me to write; and not

the kind of epic poem His Egoship,

Domitian wants.   Let silence where my poem

ceases become---with subtle eloquence

unspoken (and closed to the ignorant,

to prudes and haters, and repressors)---a

challenge to some poet in the time

of Love's own choosing to, at last, declare

Patroclus and Achilles' truth----the full

embrace of their natures by which

they loved each other in monogamy,

as Chiron taught them; nor to be slaughtered

before the walls of Troy in some battle.

But, rather, to revere Troy as the place

from which Eros, in love with Ganymede,

conveyed him to Olympus' towering height.

Chiron would have taught them that truth as well;

and of Hylas and Herakles; and of

Orpheus and Kalain:  all of them

who understood the sweetness of such Love.

Starward