Cassandra in Mycenae

It’s National Poetry Day, but as it’s also 2020 I have none of the usual excitements lined up: no school to visit; nowhere to drink beer with poetry friends. I thought I’d mark the day by posting a poem though, on this year’s theme of ‘vision’. This is an old poem from Changeling, but it’s one that means a lot to me and I think about often. These last few years I’m sure I’m not the only one to have identified with Cassandra – cursed to perpetually warn of approaching tides of surveillance capitalism, fascism and climate chaos to people who don’t want to listen. And I hardly blame them: ‘Darkness is sweeter than vision’.

Cassandra in Mycenae

So Agamemnon tugs a spluttering flap
in his daughter’s throat,
and home is a trap.

In malignant Greek sun the Scops owl hoots,
and a wife will axe
at her husband’s guts,

slop a slick maze in dust, children plot, things fall,
squalls of blood
flood the land…

And you don’t believe me, of course –
the alternative’s worse.
So go on, cover your ears –

you know what? I’m glad you don’t hear.
It’s gobbledegook, I’m a freak,
I lie I say this is only the start,

that emperors will make death sport,
people cast the first stone,
men invent thumbscrews, the Rack,

a chair you can dunk women in,
‘Honour’ killings and Pogroms,
Original Sin.

You find this depressing?
Dismiss me,
but the future will happen the same:

an Iroquois babe boil
with bubbling smallpox,
a whip flay a back to a sugarcane field,

a signwriter scribe: Arbeit macht frei,
faces melt in Japan,
child soldiers carry Kalashnikovs, coke-cans.

O every night Eric and Dylan
enter the school cafeteria –
towers fall – hysteria –

Yo lo vi. Yo esto también.
The Long March crawls
through my nightsweats, my mares,

then the Berlin Wall,
the gulags where men chew a maggot-laced horse,
lynchings, napalm, the S21,

Zodiac, Dahmer, the Wests,
the atomic bomb –
icebergs slouch into the sea…

The Snake licked my ears
and they spat in my mouth
when they gave me this curse,

and the earth is cursed,
so you’re right to naysay.
Go on, raise an eyebrow, shrug it away –

buy raspberries in March,
the villa in Pompeii.
In my head it’s rolling news,

and after a while being perfectly useless,
your face has to dry.
Your heart goes onto standby.

For all stories end with death,
those that don’t are the teller looking away,
and I don’t get that luxury.

See, now evening’s come:
turtles cover their eggs on the beach,
mountain-top beacons burn.

The amethyst tapestry’s spread on the floor,
Agamemnon’s hand’s on the door –
don’t watch! Don’t listen!

Darkness is sweeter than vision.
Bury your face in a rose, pour some wine, feel the in
and the out of your breath.

Ignore me, please. Ignore me and Death.