no translation. They left their lyre
behind and roamed the reticent heath.
Moonlight brought the bard to their hovel,
where they found the lyre fueling the hearth
while Scylla’s belly buried the pulsing
demigod whose gusts weren’t yet
mighty enough to emancipate him.
He still needed the nourishment
draining out a distant cervix.
The bard tarried until the unborn’s
menace expired. As the moon slackened,
heels in their hands, a hoe on their neck,
the bard pulled Scylla to the burial ground
and tore a hole and hummed a dirge,
their final song, and enfolded the corpse
in a lachrymose mantle the loam had pelted.
Eos arrived early, dyeing
the eastern pi a pinker gray,
but not early enough to rescue
her dead grandson. When dawn beheld
the bard shivering, she bent their palms
till triune nails tread the grass.
Keratin curved, capping their nose,
while a terser horn partitioned the eyes.
Their skin went gray then grew a pelage
whose red mimicked the molting night.
Raw grass beckoned, and the bard grazed
till twilight peppered the pastures, and they lay
on Scylla’s grave and regretted eating
insipid mutton when such delicious
culms dangled ripe around their hoofs.
The bard fattened, foraging wider
and wider circuits, but sleeping every
night on the grave grass couldn’t green.
When a shepherd awaking from a well-earned nap
or a ploughman poking a pebbly furrow
spotted the bard, he’d speed away
in a terror deducted from the tales he told
his halfwit children. If this had happened in Attica,
each boy would’ve strived to destroy the beast,
but the islanders were daft cowards.
Spring burnished, and the bard prospered.
But as the summer solstice neared,
the bard languished through the lengthy days,
unable to shed the shag in the heat
that wrung them thin. Thirst compelled them
to vacate the shade and traverse the plain
to dip their nose in the nearest spring.
On the way back the bard fainted
and sprawled prone in the profligate noon.
Their cowardly neighbors creeped forward
and strung the lyre of their strange meat
with spears and darts. Spiracles ruptured,
unclottable lesions, her life’s closure.
A bit of the bard boiled in every
hut on the plain, postponing the slaughter
of a few sheep a few weeks.
The grandchildren of the champions
who protected Britain from the two-horned monster
wore their pelage to oppose Boreas.
They put their hollowed head on a bluestone,
where it whitened for decades as if watching the dawn.