Well, there's another different kind of poem about wars.
In the beginning of that book, someone suggested I read
and I want to read it with Edward.
It's totally different kind of piece altogether.
It's called The Judgment of Paris.
And it refers, of course, to the judgment
of the legendary judgment on which the Trojan War eventually
hinged.
Long afterwards, the intelligent could
deduce what had been offered and not recognized,
and they suggest that bitterness should be confined to the fact
that the gods chose for their arbiter a mind and character
so ordinary albeit a prince.
And brought up as a shepherd, a calling
he must have liked where he had returned to it.
When they stood before him, the three naked, feminine,
deathless, and he realized that he
was clothed in nothing but mortality,
the strap of his quiver of arrows
crossing between his nipples making it seem stranger.
And he knew he must choose and on that day.
The one with the gray eyes spoke first.
And whatever she said he kept thinking he
remembered, but remembered it woven with confusion and fear.
The two faces that he called father,
the first sight of the palace were the brothers
were strangers and the dogs watched him
and refused to know him.
She made everything clear she was dazzling,
she offered it to him to have for his own,
but what he saw was the scorn above her eyes.
And her words of which he understood few all said to him
take wisdom, take power, you will forget anyway.
The one with the dark eyes spoke and everything
she said he imagined he had once wished for
but in confusion and cowardice.
The crown of his father, the crowns bowing to him,
his name everywhere like grass, only he and the sea triumphant.
She made everything sound possible,
she was dazzling, she offered it to him to hold high,
but what he saw was the cruelty around her mouth.
And her words of which he understood more all
said to him take pride, take glory, you will suffer anyway.
The third one the color of whose eyes
later he could not remember spoke last and slowly,
and of desire, and it was his.
Though up until then he had been happy with his river nymph,
here was his mind filled utterly with one girl gathering
yellow flowers and no one like her.
The words made everything seem present, almost present.
They said to him take her, you will lose her anyway.
It was only when he reached out to the voice
as though he could take the speaker herself
that his hand filled with something to give, but to give
to only one of the three.
An apple as it is told, this court itself
in a single fruit, its skin already carved to the fairest.
Then a mason working above the gates of Troy in the sunlight
thought he felt the stone shiver.
In the quiver on Paris's back, the head
of the arrow for Achilles heel smiled in its sleep.
And Helen stepped from the palace
to gather as she would do every day in that season
from the Grove, the yellow ray flowers as
tall as herself whose roots are said to dispel pain.