I introduced the Tuesday Poem concept and blog last week when I posted a poem by Sappho (6th Century BC), “You know the place: then … “

Tim Jones started the “Greek” trend on 1 June when he published Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses. Today he has continued the trend by publishing my poem, Homing, which he first selected for publication in JAAM 26 in 2008. As Tim notes on his blog today, Homing was published together with a companion poem, The Trojan Shore, both of which form part of a sequence I have been working on called Ithaca Conversations.

The Ithaca Conversations sequence reflects my long held love of myth and legend, a love which began when my Standard 4 teacher, Mrs Hook, placed a colourful poster of the “Twelve Olympians” on our classroom wall. I was fascinated, absorbed … and read every book about the Greek myths that I could lay my hands on. The reading process continued into adult life, with translations of Ovid, Homer, and less mythic but equally legendary stories such as Xenophon’s Anabasis, as well as novels such as Robert Graves’ Homer’s Daughter. But the Iliad and the Odyssey were amongst my earliest loves and the power they exerted over my imagination is best evidenced by the way they continue to infiltrate my poetry and short fiction—and that the novels I write are centred around epic, legend and myth, both in what is loosely our world (Thornspell) and alternate worlds (The Wall of Night Series.)

So I thought I’d complement Tim’s poem with another from the sequence, which also provides a slant into the Odysseus legend: This poem, The Wayfarer, was a finalist in the Takahe Poetry Competition in 2006 (judged by David Howard) and published in Takahe 62.

The Wayfarer: Odysseus at Dodona

Acorns lie strewn with old leaves, thick
as years beneath the shadow of spreading oaks
where an old woman stoops, picking up sticks
that are no more or less twisted than she, binding
them onto her bent back, and watching with one
bright, blackbird eye as the wayfarer approaches,
an oar balanced across his knotted shoulder, his eyes
narrowed between deep seams, as one who has looked
out to numerous horizons and seen wonders: the moon’s
twinned horns rising from a twilit sea like some mythic
beast, awe and terror bound into the one moment
of seeing – those same eyes strayed now into this land
of low, green hills where the margin of the world
is always close as the line of the next, wooded slope
meeting sky, and where a crone hobbles closer
beneath her load, head twisted up to see him better,
curious as a crow, cackling to think there can be
any burden greater than hers in this world of suffering,
flapping work-worn hands and husking at him
in her cracked voice, bidding him return to the hearth
fire and the home isle, to sit in the sunlit porch
with grandchildren clutching at his knees –
but the wanderer hears only the ravens cawing,
lifting in clouds from the sacred grove, darkening
the sun with their wings, crying out that he is fated,
condemned to roam across sea and land, never
resting or knowing ease until he comes at last
to some far country where salt too is a stranger
and no traveller has ever brought word to those
who dwell there, or led them to imagine
the immeasurable vastness, the restless expanse
of the great ocean, that is the circumference,
the greater part of an unknown world.

(c) Helen Lowe, 2006