What am I doing on a Saturday night? Yes, writing poetry about the Aeneid. At the moment I’m quite fond of this piece, actually. Then again, it just feels really good to be writing something (see: anything) in a creative register after so much time.
—
“Ascanius”
Ascanius the boy, not yet the destined king,
but the youth who’d toddled
through the ashes of Troy, at the age of twelve
squirmed on the lap of Dido
who mistook his blush in her arms
for love.
.
In this one motion, the body turned.
Her breast—flat, hard,
a man’s, the childless rock of
Carthage—softened.
And in the same motion the gods, who’d set this trap,
took from the queen and gave to Aeneas
her desire for the child,
for the golden trickle of his hair,
(lighter than his father’s, than her own)
sparking in her heart, denied its true object,
its first suicidal flames.
Mad then from that first diverted blush
stronger even than deceit, her love
twisted again, in the very same moment and,
forced to substitute the flesh of the man
for the flesh of the boy,
it conceived in the queen a third desire:
the desire for a child of her own
with beauty more than Cupid’s, disguised,
more than that of the pious hero,
a child who himself would have only stood as a reminder
of the original lost lover,
not Aeneas, not the father, but the boy.
