Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Sport 41: 2013

The Song of Telemachus

page 71

The Song of Telemachus

Ten years
after Troy
Odysseus my father returned—
silent at first
but then given to babbling
about an island where men were turned into swine
a one-eyed giant as tall as an oak tree
seabirds with songs that drove sailors crazy.
He admitted he couldn’t describe everywhere he’d been
but that we could take it from him that he’d even been to Hades.
My mother took to immersing herself in the pages
of the New Zealand Woman’s Weekly.
When I set out in search of him
I became as a child who looks under stones.
Sometimes I discovered monsters there too
silences rumours and shadows
the phantom of truth like a lizard that lets slip its tail.
Those dreadnoughts I once launched
in the tadpole-dark waters of a farm trough—
in quieter moments he would ask
about a boy’s ambition to be a naval architect.
Today I launch this poem
out into the ocean of his life.
The farm has become a cloud shadow racing across the Waikato.
At midday between the pump shed’s oily earth
and the solitary hour of a tank stand
I listen to an island that sings like a cicada.
Cast into this beaky ocean—
Ithaca.