This next poem is based on Euripides' play
where Heracles--
Hercules-- comes back from performing his 12 deeds
and iris, the goddess, puts madness in his vision, in his .
Mind and he ends up killing his children.
And it's titled "Chorus and Hero."
When it came, it came with eyes.
We could not close our eyes to escape its gaze.
When it came, it came with eyes that
looked through our lids, that looked through our eyes.
Its eyes looked below the hair on our heads
that did or did not blow in the wind branching out
of our brains.
The sky gathered in the cave where each one of us says I,
and I echoes.
It came and gazed into us, until it found itself staring back.
When he returned from the underworld,
he thought his eyes were the same eyes
he opened to the shades.
His eyes dilated in the dark until he could see in the dark.
The darkness opened in his head until his head could not
contain it.
He did not know night followed him when he returned.
He could not see behind him.
His children stared at him with his own eyes
when he came home to see them.
He did not know he was the danger they were in.
The gods put vision in his eyes.
He did not think he could not see the difference long ago.
He notched the arrows he shot.
Sometimes, we see with our ears the blood on hero's hands.
Sometimes, the hero walks out from his house with his hands
held out, as if to ask us, who cannot help but see if these
blood covered hands are mine.
Are these hands mine?
It's hard to see in the night flowing out behind the hero's
head if these hands are mine.
If these hands are mine to close, mine to turn palms up,
mine to bring close to my own head,
to cover our eyes with the same hands.
We do not want to see ourselves looking at our hands.
Children look through the mirrors their parents gave them
for eyes.
Tears come out the mirrors when they cry.
The mirrors widen in the dark, but in the dark show less.
The mirrors widened in fear, a little door in the mirror
opens wider.
We who gave birth to them live in a cave
in their heads, a cave in which we watch ourselves
as they hide behind a column, behind their mother's robes,
our children's eyes.
When a force moves through us, and our arms act
because our minds command them, when our mind obeys our eyes,
but our eyes are not our own eyes,
when we see as we are forced to see,
when the command comes from the gods hiding inside the eye,
replacing our eyes with a vision,
we do not say I. We say we.
We say we did this.
We did this act.
And when it's worse, when it's my hands, when
these hands are mine, we don't say we, we say it.
We say, it came upon me, a force none could resist,
soul or breath, God or madness, that acted in me.
It came.
And when it came, it came with eyes.