Πηνελόπεια

Sweet Odysseus,
Here you are again and yet you have always been,
Your face so familiar and yet so astonishingly alien.
As the years grew fat and thin again between us,
As the olives came again and again to the trees,
As I aged as I imagined you aging yourself,
I could never drive your image of youthfulness and vigor from my mind.

At times you catch my vacant stare and ask me what the trouble is.
How can I explain to you this comfortable habit of longing, of waiting,
That I have fallen into?

Dear Husband,
I love you so that I long to long for you.
You have returned, triumphant, to a widow, to an old woman.

Great Hero of Greece!
Slayer of Monsters!
Idol of Men!

In the marketplace a peasant woman praised me for my loyalty and I wanted to strike her.
“Patient wife of Odysseus! An inspiration to the women of Greece!”
Bah.

I, a heroine for my waiting?
Absurd.
And to have my love return after all?
To have him avenge my honor at last, eyes blazing with love
And the lust of murder?

Andromache had no such luxury.
Hector dead and her son dropped from the battlements of Troy by our own countrymen.
Dropped, Husband, a child, by soldiers, perhaps the same men
Who sit these days in our home,
Who share our wine.
And I who smile softly at them,
Whose hand pours their refreshment,
Is my hand not as guilty as the one
That dangled that boy over the high stone wall,
That felt, at the last, the throbbing pulse in his supple heel?

He screamed as Tereseus might have, Husband.
That same scream I heard countless nights,
And had to rush into his bed chamber
To hold him as he sobbed
Wishing his dear father back,
Wishing the war over.
We prayed softly together until he fell asleep,
But never for victory,
And never for another’s pain.

Praise be to Zeus that you returned at all, my love.
But you have returned too late to fill
This emptiness.
The war and your absence ravaged my womb years ago,
And have left it barren,
A cold and shriveled thing.

Even as you seek to fill me with endless caresses,
I imagine my body is being pillaged,
As the women of Troy
Were raped by your soldiers,
And in this cruel way
Atone for their sins.