Iphigenia

I

The ships at Aulis lie, beached,
blackened hulls heaving in heat-waves,
tar disintegrating, rotting flesh slicing through
the wafts of salt, nutty shore reeds, baked marble.

Men scream, chant, bellow 
each night by torchlight, living choral masks;
Agamemnon paces full-armored,
overlayed by a single sheet of gold:
pantomiming Ares, frozen in the expression
of a lion looking up from his kill.

Iphigenia

travels towards Aulis
to be married to the knife,
to lose her maidenhead to the lust of an army,
to a pantheon of demons 
in a game of balance.

II

Hellas

Have you left your early morning olive trees,
your marbled hillsides,
simple cries of crickets,
careful meditation of smoothing white cheese,
joy and leisure of hearth and philosophy,
to chase Helen, to die at Troy,
to placate the irrational, faceless, cruel gods?

Have you forgot those gods of gold are the gods 

without law are the gods 

of finance softly speaking about sacrifice,

smelling with delight the odors of the funeral games,

the games bellowing on screens everywhere?

And I see, her, Iphigenia, throat sliced open,
in the faces of the old, the simple, the poor,
and the children who have lost their patrimony:
their cathedral of beauty, 

their shards of pottery for voting,
their mesimeri scoffed, 

their slavery to the wage.