will be the kind of question that hitherto
you never needed ask. The king will shun
your advice and call you deaf. You’ll hear surf run
upon the beaches, but the sound will seem
to pour from Ida, where you’ll think birds teem
on all the rustling trees the king cut down
to build his fleet, and these weird sounds will drown
the king’s words and make it hard to obey.
You’ll tell yourself you’ll only slip away
from Knossos briefly, but your search will take
you far inland. You’ll hear the rebels fake
surf, breeze, and birdsong on their instruments.
You’ll join a camp where peasants sleep in tents,
share equally what they possess, and train
to fight the king and save what may remain
of the rich island he’ll abuse so long.
And you’ll discover happiness in their song
condemning greed and slavery and soon
hear your own voice singing it. The moon
gives light to everyone and may suffice
to start a revolution. Your advice
will guide their nightly raids to terrorize
the king’s lean soldiers and demoralize
their rarely paid commanders. You’ll collect
weapons to arm the soldiers who’ll defect
and every shepherd who’ll desert her flock,
eager to say she helped the rebels knock
Minos off his padded gypsum throne.
Knossos won’t repel you. Defensive stone
would check the rebels’ offensive bronze, but walls
will go unbuilt, and Daedalus will spend
his last months molding statues. They’ll defend
the king’s taut vanity until he loses
everything but his flesh, a pile of bruises
dumped in a dungeon. Cretan revelry
will reach his ears, but his black eyes won’t see
the statues falling down. You’ll dispossess
surviving loyalists and force success
to follow worth. The rich will fail to save
their foolish heirs from toil. A former slave
will exercise administrative talent,
while a palace leech, let’s say a gallant
who courted Phaedra once, will work the fields.
But your government won’t raise crop yields,
only distribute destitution fairly.
The rebels’ just society will barely
endure ten years, but you’ll die happily
before that happens: while you cross the sea
you’ll interrupt your suicide by forgetting
most of this prophecy. Haha! Begetting
bastards will be your weakness. One will claim
to represent you. He’ll exploit your fame
to ruin your life’s work. He’ll set a throne
in the people’s hall and treat it as his own.
The revolution won’t entirely
fail. It will have ended slavery,
preempted foreign warfare, set Crete loose
from the offspring of a self-styled son of Zeus,
and proved a social order can undergo
a change abrupt as blue skies to hard snow.