‘So jam this stuff into your ears,’ he tells us,
‘I need to listen to the siren’s song and you cannot.’
And there, strung up on the cross-tree of the mast
He writhes in his passion. ‘Oh gods, release me!’
He pleads to the deaf. I’d let him loose in a moment,
The fool. One swift cut with the old, sharp knife
In my belt and you can join your gods indeed.

‘Don’t argue sailor! Just start rowing,’ he’d said.
But then I too would love to hear that awful song,
To see their faces, even follow them to a doom;
A better one than this I’m sure, tied to an oar
Feeling a more mundane agony but sharp enough.
Salt in the eyes, blisters and strain, paying once more
The exhausting price of his indulgent ecstasy.

It sounded good, so many years ago. Escape the farm,
The dull rural drudgery and in any case could I
Refuse the king? No, I’d trade my strong arm
My once straight back for life as a warrior.
Learn to fight, drink, loot a fortune for old age and
Along the way, lay with some pretty wine-dark girls.
Live well and die a hero, the loudest of lives.

But there’s no gold or glory left in my kitbag now.
Not even food and precious little kit as well.
A bitter few we are now, after the long years
On that beach, sand in the bread, flies in our hair,
The steady loss of shipmates to sickness and
Rotting wounds. My brother gone; the carpenter
Who carved the hooves and mane, soon gone.

There was a brief beserker’s joy in the rape
Of the great city. By then they’d earned our hate
And so we took our burning fatal fee; we were
A curse of slicing flesh and crushing bones or worse.
Afterwards we took the desperate girls, their fathers dead;
Willing enough they were for olives and some bread,
But it was a wretched price we paid to make
Reluctant whores of brave men’s daughters.

‘Don’t argue, just start rowing,’ and so again we will
Until there are none of us to fuel their greed,
Their mad need for victory and immortality.
With each cursed episode we dwindle unremarked
By history and the songs. To emphasise a mad king’s valour
We are consumed by sundry gods or monsters
And become the faltering engine of his boat, no more.