Clytemnestriad

I, who only tried
To keep faith with my child,
By crimsoning the tile whereon her killer last respired,
After he declined
The red carpet treatment
Saying “No, no; No sell-out I, I’m
Too rugged,
A man of the people!”
Oh, I smiled, thinking the while,
Is that what they call
Bundling our daughter into the fire
You’re just a touch old-fashioned?

No matter, I
Ensured
He walked on red toward the end
Nay, he rather
Swam in it.
And he for whom I’d do the same
Felt unobliged
To avenge his sister’s cries.
Had it been him whose hands
The bearded butcher’d bound,
Had it been him in whose
Blood his father'd drowned,
I’d have sunk the blade into the swine’s
Hide just as surely.
But no gratitude from this
Mother’s son
Nor grief for his
Murdered sibling stayed his hand.
And when I, a shade, cried “justice”
And my sisters sought to set
An example for future matricides
In came Apollo with a cry
Of sudden innocence
“What’s all this then!
Mercy is not strained
There is a higher law
Than ‘eye for eye’
Or curse for hex”—the first I’d heard
Him preach that text;
Where was
This turner of other cheeks
When he was coaching my son
To puncture me full of leaks?
No matter; by
The time it came to trial
He quickly gave the real
Game away; I had to smile
At that cock and bull story he told
(Emphasis on cock
Well, and bull too)
About how the mother was a mere
Incident
To the generative process
An indifferent vessel to keep
The male’s sperm immaculate,
The true content of the child being encoded
Exclusively in the father’s ejaculate.
(This—from the god of Aesthetics—
A take that would age
Well neither from the standpoint of social values
Nor of Mendelian genetics);
So that what it came down to finally when
The Furies had won the debate
(“He killed his mother,
And all she’d done,” they observed,
“Was ice the pig that offed her daughter—
A fate he eminently deserved”),
As was clear in the eyes
Of anyone truly keeping score,
Was that the God of Music shrugged
And said, “yeah,
But men’s lives matter more.”
And there he ended his plea:
Adding only “by the way, Father Zeus would agree.”
And then Pallas, whom I’d looked to
To vindicate my rights and expunge my shame
Pipes up at that moment like some cosmic Ghislaine
(Maxwell) to say, outright: “You know,
I’ve got to side
With Daddy on this one,
(For all I
Was a headache to him growing up hardeharhar), I
Am, after all,
A motherless child, so my
Vote goes to the penis’s side.”
I had to clear my ears just to make sure I’d
Heard that right, but yes, she didn’t even try
To dignify it with a grander-sounding lie
She just said, “I choose
The male principle every time.”
And then cast the deciding vote to deprive
Me and Iffy of our rights just as surely
As my son and husband stole our lives.
And so it continues,
Right down to the present
If you’ll let me regale you
With some truths unpleasant
The pricks slaughter daughters
To get their fair winds to glory
Then they make the laws, buy the judges,
And then write the story.
And the Furies are condemned
As atavistic outliers
When they weren’t the ones
Burning teenagers on pyres!
And even Athena said, “look
You were basically right
The guy killed his mother,
But, O, ye children of Night,
Ye shall be richly rewarded for this disappointment
You’ll get to terrorize future criminals as a kind of societal ointment”
And so, on that day, the majesty was redeemed
For all time, of Courts,
The Honorable, the Supreme,
And right up to the present
They’ve been pulling a Pallas
Whenever the question came down
To the rule of the phallus.