Watching Homer Struggle Poem by Robert Ronnow

Watching Homer struggle
to explain how a god wounded by a mortal
cannot die but may thereafter live with minor pain

and the humor when that god
complains to Jove that His supervision of His daughter
is inadequate and His Love too unconditional

while Diomed (or Tydides)
wreaks havoc on the Trojans and Hector
gives it back (in kind)

anatomically correct descriptions
of spears piercing jawbones and groins
sons without fathers hunting and fishing thereafter

alone. Written
amazingly presciently!
as a metaphor for Vietnam (our war)

forgotten consensually
as this generation slips lazily away
to Hades (on Huck Finn's raft)

where the lights are always blue, gentian actually,
supper's served at 4 and former adversaries
pass the heavy hanging time playing pinochle (and pool) .

We're selling the house to pay the taxes.
Pallas Athena wars among the men
from the axle of her chariot

and Venus is injured by Diomed,
standing in the field of battle where she never should
      have been,
in her adorable hand.

What has this to do with Solomon in jail.
Not the Jewish king, a black American male,
same thing.

Your children can be failed at school and marched to
      war.
You can be taxed and sent to gaol for the honor of it.
anyone lived in a pretty how town.

We have no obligation
to perform the Iliad or read poems and even Homer
considers Achilles effete (compared to Hector)

and Odysseus is wrong even when he's right.
Therefore, modern man explores
the mathematics of circles in coordinate planes and their
      tangents

(when) (once) (soon)
the secret of warp speed is discovered
expansion of the species will be limitless and permanent.



- with a line by e.e. cummings