O, Heliades, your tears flow once more down your poplar bark ragged,
Cries hushed forever below the brown wood of your transformèd eyes.
Phaethon, your brother, lies cold in the tomb ringèd round by your thicket,
Phaethon, that poor boy, that golden-haired mortal who once rode the sky.
O, Heliades, for what do you mourn? Seas polluted to poison?
Is it your brother— poor fool— who had wingèd too close to the stars?
Is it the blazing of forests that makes your tears fall from your lashes?
Fire like the flames that wreathed Phaethon, drowned down in the watery dark?
O, Heliades, we tortured the sky, turned the rain into acid,
Bleeding and breaking and taking as earth turned to dust down below.
Will you yet cry for us when in our haste we become our undoing?
Or will your tears cease
your breath of relief?
when we leave you alone to your grove?
Cries hushed forever below the brown wood of your transformèd eyes.
Phaethon, your brother, lies cold in the tomb ringèd round by your thicket,
Phaethon, that poor boy, that golden-haired mortal who once rode the sky.
O, Heliades, for what do you mourn? Seas polluted to poison?
Is it your brother— poor fool— who had wingèd too close to the stars?
Is it the blazing of forests that makes your tears fall from your lashes?
Fire like the flames that wreathed Phaethon, drowned down in the watery dark?
O, Heliades, we tortured the sky, turned the rain into acid,
Bleeding and breaking and taking as earth turned to dust down below.
Will you yet cry for us when in our haste we become our undoing?
Or will your tears cease
your breath of relief?
when we leave you alone to your grove?
El
Feb 25, 2022
Some background:
Phaethon and his sisters, the Heliades, were children of the titan Helios, Greek god of the sun. Phaethon once begged his father to let him pilot the Sun-chariot across the sky, and Helios relented. Phaethon, however, lost control of the horses, and he careened between heaven and Earth, wrecking havoc upon the planet until Zeus struck him from the sky. His sisters cried so much over his grave that the gods turned them into poplar trees and their tears into amber, to release them from their misery.
Apparently Homer's poems, in the original Greek, are written in dactylic hexameter. Since the characters were Greek and the style I chose was sort of like epic poetry, I decided to try using that poetic meter (except for the last line)...
I have discovered that six dactyls are not the nicest things this planet has to offer.