The Hero

In the beginning who chose the hero?
The little cunning man with the wits?
Always one jump ahead, Odysseus or Tom Thumb—
He cheats for a gain, and wins,
Riddles the way to a throne, and reigns,
The sphinx, the giant always lose,
Monsters were feared and ridiculed:
It was the laughter killed.

Why are we not ashamed towards our animals,
Their rituals and their games?
What dance-school discipline must rule
The capercaillie courting?
What protocol controls the lion and she-wolf?
Our make-shift lives insult their laws,
We never could abide the rules, not we alone,
From terp and midden to atomic pile
And Johnny-Go-Round-The-Moon.

Whoever tailored us
Had cut his cloth on the bias,
Against the thread of time,
Askance the habitat ours once as well;
The shared catastrophe our shifts reduced to history.
From birth we botch, bungle and improvise
Those jungle victories, far otherwise
From them, the formal animals
With bowing, mincing, threatening manners—
The fools, to stand on ceremony!
They smelt our sickness and they fled—not soon enough;
Theirs was the inverse our Eden.

Only the reek of panic in our infant dreams
Left from the wreck of paradise?
When the pursued became the pursuer
Against his frailty and counter nature,
The weak animal with teeth of flint, hands
Of flaked stone and opening lids blazed basilisk
And so they fled, And though they fled the sickness grew
In dust and pest, the disease of man
Had infected all.

We weren't the first who learned to kill
But there was balance held before our time,
The big catastrophes came
From earth's own ageing body;
Drought and flood as the centuries turn
Drought and flood were the end of one
And beginning of another gens and family.

Our oldest hero has let us down,
There was always something missing,
Keener than wits and wiser than cunning;
It was the wrong hero from the beginning.

1969?

NOTES

• Johnny-Go-Round-The-Moon = Apollo moon shots?