The "Father" Issue Poem by Daniel Brick

Orpheus, are you perhaps fatherless,
except in the myths, those stories
we can just barely trust to be
true. Some have given you the greatest
honor any man born out of the Greek-shaped
world can receive: the paternity of Apollo,
the bloodline of the God of Light,
the source of both Poetry and Music.
Others claim a King and a Muse for
your parents. Either story tells why,
even as a youth, you stood every morning
at the highest point in the landscape,
erect, playing the lyre, motionless
as the Light flooded your outer being
and your inner being poured forth
song-poems of worship that ascended
on great shafts of light backward
to the shining realm of shining Apollo.
Was not this indeed a son's doing?
Or perhaps Apollo adopted you as a son
out of love for you, but forgot to list
it in the Olympian archives? And so you
were at once a favored son, a boy orphaned
by a god, a mere mortal. What a complex fate!
But each day you rose in darkness, cleared
your throat and practiced your high notes
as you climbed, flexed your fingers
so they moved nimbly across the strings
of your lyre, and so prepared, you offered
Apollo, whom you loved, the purest worship
of a man for a god. Only the nine Muses
witnessed your sacrifice, and they wept,
even as they joined you in dance and song.