Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MYCENAEAN REVENGE, by CALE YOUNG RICE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MYCENAEAN REVENGE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: The sea-kings of crete, phoenicia, and sicily
Last Line: And vow to refrain from raping-quests.
Subject(s): Courts & Courtiers; Daughters; Rape


The sea-kings of Crete, Phoenicia, and Sicily
Raped six coasts and a hundred women.
I was one of them... Pharon had me...
The breasts he fondled budded and bloomed
And fed the babe I begot with hatred...
And now my ravisher, Pharon, is doomed.

Hard it has been to wait for vengeance,
Slave in the house of a Cretan thief;
Filling afresh his chill amphorae
Dawn and night with oil and water.
But now my suckled son is a man --
And tonight shall ravish Pharon's daughter.

This is the way it shall be. At dusk,
When he returns from another raid
And calls for ten strong wines to lotion
His beard of blood and his blood of lust,
Then he will look for his tall young daughter
Who loathes his heat with a cold disgust.

Leaving his gypsum throne in the megaron,
Flinging the sistrum player aside,
Forth will he stride, by the fountain weeping
Like a lone slave, to his daughter's door.
There he will find her bound and ravished
And cold with hate as an unpaid whore.

Writhing veins will swell in his forehead,
Wild will he rage as a minotaur,
Till the loosed lips of his tall young daughter
Tell him his rapes have raped her too;
For her tongue is a fang of the snake-goddess,
Piercing the heart with poison through.

Then will he seek me.... But in a galley
I and my son and ten slaves more
With a cask of gold will set toward Ithaca --
Over a sea that has no track;
And Pharon may foam like a hound behind,
Till the vitals of him and the brain crack.

Round to the sea-kings then will the story
Go -- and the fame of it shall pall
The wine-boards boast of every rover
Having a daughter budding breasts;
And each in his sleep shall start and shudder
And vow to refrain from raping-quests.





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