were rubbing their hands over watch fires.
I cloaked him in darkness
and no one saw us pass.
Priam clasped the knees
of his son’s astonished killer,
the hero, who uttered threatening words
at first, but finally saw, in the old man’s grief,
the image of his own—
and together they wept.
The body passed through the Scaean gates.
They performed the rightful obsequies
and the king bade his son farewell.
Hector, tamer of horses, burned on the pyre.
And it would not be long before his father joined him
in the place where the dead forget their dead.
Semele
Ecstatically she burns alive.
Something survives
in the womb of the Thunderer’s thigh:
A fetal deity.
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