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Three Warriors
Sonnets by Ellin Anderson
4 July 2004
MUTTON-PIE SWAMP
With snake-necked cranes, with musket-thick black snakes,
With turtles, frogs, and little humming flies,
With screaming martens, and with deer, he takes
His furtive meals of smuggled mutton pies
As Bradford's new militia meets to train
At Parker's Tavern on the village green.
He will not go -- but shivers in the rain
As April showers wash his linens clean.
"Long live King George!" He makes the marsh resound
With other empty voices -- and once more,
"Long live King George!" He huddles on the ground.
The sky cracks open, and begins to pour;
It fills his tricorn hat. He tries to sleep,
And, failing that, devours his fellow sheep.
ULTIMA THULE
Against the darkness and the killing cold,
Against their ursine hunger, and the sword,
The summer sailors let the hearth enfold
Wild hearts, and raised the aura of the horde
In golden chords of harp and flute and words
That burned and ravished like the Northern Lights:
An art of thought as swift as Odin's birds,
And strong as eagles. Westward still, he fights
Against more gold and grief than courage fears,
Until, fast-pinioned where the sun must sink
In sight of Babylon, the rover hears
Horns of Gehenna, drums that make him think
How quickly and how cruelly overthrown,
The heart that moves to rhythms not its own!
THE WITCH
In vivid dreams, she held him by the heel,
In crystal dreams, she dipped him in the pot
Upon a Highland hearth -- and felt the seal
Surround her soldier son. And though he fought
Through Hell and back, he never tasted gore,
And though he missed his mother every day,
As she missed him -- both cursing Churchill's war --
Somehow he felt he'd never gone away.
To left and right, his comrades took the shell;
From rank to rank, he saw commanders die;
In woods and burning villages they fell
Around him, shouting, "Damn your evil eye!"
Hot shrapnel in his heel conveyed him home;
Achilles died -- and got a longer poem.
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~joelja/iliad.html
"The Iliad," prose translation by Samuel Butler. This epic by the Greek poet Homer tells the story of Achilles, and was the basis for the current film, "Troy," with Brad Pitt as the tragic hero.
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Ellin Anderson has won many awards for poetry in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. A lifelong resident of Massachusetts, she was born in Boston in 1958, graduated from The Pingree School in 1976, and received a B.A. in Art from Mount Holyoke College in 1982. Anderson has been published in The Longfellow Society Journal, The Boston Poet, Mediums, Pleiades/ArtsNorth, and Orbis. She created and produced "Poetry With Ellin Anderson," a weekly radio show on WNBP am 1450 (Newburyport), which was sponsored by World Learning Incorporated and the Summer Abroad Program.
http://home.earthlink.net/~ellingreeranderson
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