achilles 

Ilium’s sword is overcome by Homer’s spear.
An epic verse that masks and masks again
the players in a drama cast in stone.
They come from out the mind to appear
as Grecian warriors reborn in the flesh;
who caught up in the battlement of war
suffer mortal wounds. Yet, as heroes dare
to gain the spoils that others can but wish.
I do not see the man whom Homer was
for he is too cloaked within the path of time.
The sharpened stylus moving with the rhyme
of atom touching atom only finds the fair Achilles;
not the hand that writes him on the stage,
not the mentor of this student of the page.

September 1995

Source: The author

I am a Canadian poet currently living in Chippawa. Over the years my poems have appeared in a number of anthologies and periodicals beginning with the anthology ‘Canadian Poets of 1969’.