Parable of the Hostages - Louise Gluck

The Greeks are sitting on the beach

wondering what to do when the war ends. No one

wants to go home, back

to that bony island; everyone wants a little more

of what there is in Troy, more

life on the edge, that sense of every day as being

packed with surprises. But how to explain this

to the ones at home to whom

fighting a war is a plausible

excuse for absence, whereas

exploring one’s capacity for diversion

is not. Well, this can be faced

later; these

are men of action, ready to leave

insight to the women and children.

Thinking things over in the hot sun, pleased

by a new strength in their forearms, which seem

more golden than they did at home, some

begin to miss their families a little,

to miss their wives, to want to see

if the war has aged them. And a few grow

slightly uneasy: what if war

is just a male version of dressing up,

a game devised to avoid

profound spiritual questions? Ah,

but it wasn’t only the war. The world had begun

calling them, an opera beginning with the war’s

loud chords and ending with the floating aria of the sirens.

There on the beach, discussing the various

timetables for getting home, no one believed

it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;

no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable

affliction of the human heart: how to divide

the world’s beauty into acceptable

and unacceptable loves! On the shores of Troy,

how could the Greeks know

they were hostages already: who once

delays the journey is

already enthralled; how could they know

that of their small number

some would be held forever by the dreams of pleasure,

some by sleep, some by music?

- from Meadowlands

"Neil" - Henri Cole

My mother never forgave my father for sleeping
with Neil. You don’t need a wife, she screamed;
You already have one. She sounded like a whipping woman
but she was wounded. For years, she shut herself
in their bedroom and slept. Once, her baking was so fine
that the silverfish in our house were morbidly obese.
To think of my parents now costs me such an effort. 
My heart thumps as if I might faint or die. 
I hope they are resting. They were not so strong,
pulling on each other’s hair when the devil seized them—
Mother, barefoot in her nightgown, and Father, in his
leather slippers and black-watch robe—
like erect white stems blurred silvery gray by pollen.
I feel so much admiration for them. 

- Henri Cole

Robinson Jeffers - "People and a Heron"

People and a Heron
by Robinson Jeffers

A desert of weed and water-darkened stone under my western
            windows
The ebb lasted all afternoon,
And many pieces of humanity, men, women, and children,
            gathering shellfish,
Swarmed with voices of gulls the sea-breach.
At twilight they went off together, the verge was left vacant,
            an evening heron
Bent broad wings over the black ebb,
And left me wondering why a lone bird was dearer to me than
            many people.
Well: rare is dear: but also I suppose
Well reconciled with the world but not with our own natures
            we grudge to see them
Reflected on the world for a mirror.