On the voyage to Crete you’ll crave drowning,
but forgetting my vision will prevent your self-slaughter.
The king will revile your advice and call you
hard of hearing. A hollowed hiss,
similar to the tide’s slither
but seeming to enter your ears from the south
and punctuated by avian peeps—
as though Minos hadn’t commanded the felling
of Ida’s forests for his foreign war—
will drown out your master’s miserable rants.
You’ll tell yourself you’ll return quickly,
but the hissing will lead you on a lengthening trek
till you find the rebels faking birdsong,
red leaves’ rustling, and the rollers’ fall
on their instruments. You’ll mingle with the rebels
and sleep in their tents. They’ll teach you to share,
and you’ll help them get ready for the revolution
they’ll hope will rescue a remnant of Crete
before Knossos annuls everything.
From their songs, you’ll learn to love justice
and to hate slavery and the hoards you defended.
Soon you’ll be singing those songs yourself.
With your tactical advice, they’ll attack the king’s
outposts, escaping unscathed in the darkness
after horrifying his hungry soldiers
and humiliating their ill-paid captains.
You’ll feed and arm the defectors and train
the shepherdesses who will ditch their flocks
to say that they helped unseat Minos
from his cushioned throne. He’ll cast bronze
statues of himself instead of rearing
walls around Knossos, which would assure
that your last attack would be less easy.
Having been dumped in a dungeon, Minos
will hear his people hacking away
with breathless joy at his bronze image.
The loyalists will lose their riches,
and you’ll attempt to align talent and labor
so a one-time princeling might work the fields
suddenly managed by his manumitted chattel.
But the fields won’t cooperate, and you only succeed
in partitioning destitution evenly.
The commune will endure a decade, and you’ll die
happy before its final days.
Siring bastards will be your weakness.
One of those bastards will abuse the people’s
memory of you and make himself king.
But this demagogue and his dynasty
won’t put an end to every achievement
of your revolution, which will liberate
slaves and women, ward off warfare,
and depose a self-styled son of Zeus,
proving a country is capable of change
like blue heavens bleeding snowfall.