Leda, with bloodstained nails
and feathers clasped in fists,
walks away from the lakeside.
A few bent reeds,
Crushed rushes,
A white corpse;
Her triumphant head held high.
The hard-won bruised blotches
that adorn her pale skin
will deepen to purple,
to green, to yellow,
then fade into the ether, traceless,
painless to the touch.
Resilience not new hatched from within,
some inception by brute force, but
Built into her bones,
gifted there by her mother,
fortified by her own fair hands.
Thus the great wings that had beaten
the air into submission
then turned their gaze toward Leda
now lie in tatters,
sullied with mud for their crime.
Olympus falls to its knees
with a thud dense with significance
as a helpless beak trembles and quakes,
then stills.
The shell of that most royal bird
will be claimed by the earth,
granted only the natural honours it deserves:
Flesh feeding the lowliest of creatures,
Rib cage open to the sky
for the breeze to dance around,
Webbed feet melting out of existence,
Beetles burrowing behind the broken bill,
Eyes cherry-picked by airborne kin;
New life will burgeon
from the ruins of its breast.
Life that will be gentler.
That won’t seek to overcome.
Olympus crumbles, leaderless,
like it’s made of breadcrumbs
for birds to feast upon,
a new gap in a Greek skyline,
In which something new could be built.
From the dust emerges
a humanity unafraid of that divine seat,
Free from celestial visitation,
or noble violence.
Leda regrets the temporary bruising,
The brief map of scratches that led back
to memories she’d rather forget,
gone now except in the mind,
The bloodstains she had to scrub to remove,
and nothing else.
Alex Howe is a queer poet currently residing in Brighton. Their work has recently appeared online through Young Poet’s Network and in print in Pilot Press’ Queer Anthology of Wilderness, and in multiple Eggbox Publishing anthologies. Follow their work at www.alexhowewrites.wordpress.com.