After the Greeks Tippy-toed out of a Horse

By Sarah Sarai

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It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!

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            Arms, and the man…
                        Virgil
 

Christ almighty was that a year.
The damn war FINALLY over
though one many-faced hero heroed-on 
ten more to slay a weaver’s suitors lined-up 
and slicked-back on Ithaca Ave.
 
THAT year, warriors de-warriorized, or tried to.
Mothers had died fathers had died wives 
husbands aunts uncles sisters brothers had died. 
 
But not one golden-guy,
with eyes a glinty glint 
and sweaty sweat on biceps bulging.
 
Sailing sea-y seas Aeneas ashored on land
of a lady founder 
who took one gandy gander and 
plunged into bicepboy’s eyes—not deep pools—
 
and after the jumping-off-joy—
no small joy we agree—was deady dead,
having lit sticks and self and such when 
loverboy sailed again. Soon,
the city-on-a-boot he birthed,
 
Rome, all Latinated and lawyered up, 
warriorized and empired, though, 
we admit, the engineering was good.
 
Those aqueducts and bridges, those walls.  
They were something else.

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Sarah Sarai is a birthright New Yorker and skintight Californian. Her most recent collection, Bright-Eyed (Poets Wear Prada), is a sort-of account of her family’s westward motion. 

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