STUCK ON AN ISLAND


(Author’s note. This poem is based on Homer’s Odyssey)


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(Image from wikimedia commons)
When you read the Odyssey,
You find me here, dear reader,
With miles and miles of untamed sea,
From here and where I’m leader.


In the land that they call Ithaca,
I’m king of all I see.
But now it’s ruled by suitors,
For my wife Penelope.
They think that I am dead and gone,
A resident of Hades,
And now they fight for the right to wed,
The loveliest of ladies.


They eat me out of house and home,
That damned annoying crowd,
Waiting while my wife completes
Dead Lord Laertes’ shroud.


They were asked to leave so many times,
By my son, Telemachus.
His requests they fell on cloth-like ears,
Damn that Eurymachus!


On the day that I get back there,
Swift death is sure to follow.
I’ll shoot them with the expertise
Of the archer-God Apollo.


But I’m stuck here on this island,
For years I’ve been in hiding.
You see, I made an enemy
Of the great sea-God Poseidon.
He says that I did something,
He regards as blasphemous.
I didn’t know that was his son,
The cyclops, Polyphemus.
I drove a stake into his eye,
While trapped within his lair,
And now he cannot see at all
(He has no eye to spare.)
When I escaped, my men as well,
He cried “the prophecy!
It’s now come true, all thanks to you,
My father God of sea,
Will have his vengeance on you all
For your cowardly attack!”.
And one by one my men did fall.
I’m stuck with no way back.


I’m not afraid of death, oh no!
I faced many the lethal killer,
Like the great whirlpool Charybdis,
And the awe-inspiring Scylla.


But to try to cross the ocean,
On a flimsy home-made raft,
While threatened by Poseidon?
The whole idea is daft!


So I’m stuck here on this island,
With a nymph I must love nightly,
For Calypso has the hots for me,
I blame that Aphrodite.