After Reading a Play by Aeschylus


Torn by the god
between the rocks of the Aegean
and the high wave of the Caucasus,
she falls on the black glass
of the stage –
Io, beloved of Zeus,
driven across the world,
maddened by jealous Hera;
turned, grotesquely, into a cow.

Prophecy lies:
there is no end
to the voice of her suffering.

The god’s love is the storm
of the ten thousand eyes of Argus.
He is blind as the sun
in its munificence
moving across the air
exalted after pleasure.

Humankind
is a child of water made of stone.
Their pain is darkness and silence.
The mouth of a hero
who knows everything and nothing
buzzes with gadflies and ashes.

Yet the woman’s cry is the daughter of generations.
It reaches us, gnarled in a distant wind.
It echoes long in the canyons of time.
It does not allow forgetfulness
or peace
in suffering traced 
in a poet’s words
wrought of gossamer and iron.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews. His two children’s books, the first stories in the Otherwise series –  If You Ride A Crooked Trolley . . . (serialized in Synchronized Chaos under the title “The Ghost Trolley”) and The Judgment Of Biestia – will be published in November 2023.