It is a fearful thing to be flung
from the hand of the living god.
Zeus handed Troy’s smoking altars to the Greeks:
the steamy mulch poured on the flame,                                                   1490
the myrrh that climbed the azure roof,
the tall citadel and Ida’s high ridges
thick with ivy, cut with snow-fed culverts,
mountaintop the sun strikes first and last­—
once filled with light, once sacred.

Antistrophe A

Gone are the offerings and the holy cries
of the dance in the dark night
and the night-long festivals,
the golden statues of the gods;
and the moon-dials that number and trace
the moon’s phases in the nights’ supernal silence,                                       1500
that number the months.
What did you feel
in the blaze of the besieged city
as the flames licked your chair?
Did the smoke get in your eyes? Make you blind?
Was Troy the sacrifice you had in mind?

Strophe B

O young men, O my mate,
O you dead, now spirits stumbling
on the wrong shore,
while your bodies lie                                                                            1510
above ground, mud-caked and rotting,
for ravens to prey on.
You gods—build me a sea-going vessel
with darting wings
to bring me to the pastures of Argos,
where horses graze,
where Cyclopian walls
break the sky.
They are herding the children
like heifers, lowing, down to the gate.                                                      1520
(Chorus turns to Hecuba.)
MA—MA—
The herdsmen of Achaea are taking me out
of your sight, away from your arms
leading me down to the midnight boats
whose oars clip the waves
all the way to port
hard by the double-gated island,
Pelops’ keep,
where fathers eat their children.

Antistrophe B

Let that thunder                                                                                    1530
break the toy ship in the middle sea,
clap the oar with fire,
break Menelaus.
He exiled me, enslaved me,
a wife to constant sorrow.  
Break the mirrors, girls’ toys,
Helen’s first love,
would that they were all shattered.

Menelaus—may he never return
to Laconia, to the limestone cliffs                                                              1540
of that grubby backwater
where men live like stones;
to his father’s smoky hearth,
to the bronze fault of the goddess.
Who looked on
when he forced great Hellas
to a filthy union
made in the mud of the river bed?