What is our Trojan War? Will we scribe the memories of blood and fire Preserving the trauma in poetry So it can be recounted heroically A safety buffer A mask A story swaddled in allegory

Now we can sing of arms and armies Instead of whispering horrors in the dead of night Half remembered screams At the arms that grabbed us with all their might Thin steel jabbed into a leg until it drew blood Now only scars remember the blood that once flowed And yet deep down we know We survived a cataclysm by the skin of our teeth

Shhh … we mustn’t let us see The truth

We didn’t survive Spectral forms write our epitaph The ones who are left behind in the rubble To bear witness To sing our songs While we died in the burning We lie broken and charred beneath a thick layer of ash And yet we seek a way to sing of the aftermath A eulogy to take the horrors and translate them into a new tongue So we take our smashed pieces And we mosaic a resurrection

We take our scars ... and we make of them our art

And so we sing of warriors and battles and great wheeled horses

We sing of Hector and Achilles — we too are bonded by the enmity of a bloody embrace We sing of Cassandra — we too will be accused of madness and lies We sing of Aeneas — we too must flee to start a new life And we sing of Helen — we know that the only way to spark change is to burn the past to the ground

We sing of the love and rage of heroes

For reality demands we also remember this

Trauma must not be looked on directly And so we bear witness through 'i's that mask

As Zeus once warned Semele Raw truth is a bloody affair It leaves us burning on a smoldering pyre

It is Paris' arrow to the heel of Achilles It will rip us apart like whirling Bacchantes Consuming our flesh in their divine ecstasies

And so we 'i' our battlefields through sacred allegory We chant the story of our triumphs and tragedies Safely Without the flames of war licking our face

The people may come to destroy us from the sea But if we turn their violence into poetry We preserve the horrors in metaphor So we can see without immolation An ancient muse sings the notes of our pain She sings of our anger She takes the broken, charred pieces of our rage And she transforms them into art A mosaic that will allow us to survive To tell the tale of our Trojan War