Gamma.

gamma

   i am tired of keeping faith with a dead man's empty bed, i might
   have had another child now in this one-son-per-generation house; but
   my companion at night is my wet pillow; groaning from side to side;
   awaiting news from passing strangers

   sleep at last and immortal night have been balsam to crying and
   wearying day, otherwise, stranger sitting like a statue, mine has
   been the life of longing for the absent man; till i am now
   well-schooled in waiting and fending off

   i have prayed to artemis, goddess and queen, patron saint of mine,
   to take away life from inside my heart for fear i would one day be
   saddled by a worse man than odysseus who broke my hymen; i hope the
   goddess hears me

   well, i suppose all good things never last that long; twenty years
   is a generation gone, but mine were twenty years without a husband,
   of husbanding myself, of growing up again, of second courting ending
   in this disaster

   telemachos is becoming a man now: just because he has a beard he
   assumes he is boss around here and practices that disappearing act
   of his father's without a word: he needs a father to take him in
   hand

   this killer--hero, i suppose--has decimated antinoos and the rest:
   the cream of ithaka society that paid me court is dead; for antinoos
   the generous giver, a silent tear; but now that they are dead, what
   choice have i?

   an irate god could have envied me this endless merrymaking without
   its being odysseus: this one is sometimes too old, at others he's
   quite a beau, and now he sits there quietly in profile thinking
   what?

   should it be he?