I’ve been Agamemnon, Leader of Men
in a ten-year war for that slut-bitch Helen
and the cuckold Menelaus of the loud war cry.
I’ve seen Ajax and Achilles die—
both of them better men than me,
one strong as a wall, one swift as a deity;
each of them unequalled, and each equally
dead as old dirt, now.

I’ve done things you don’t want to do at all:
smashed a baby’s head against Troy wall—
Hector’s one son. Necessity
is the mother of all murderers, including me.
I slaughtered a daughter in Aulis for a breeze
to take us to Troy. And all of these
blood-guilted things were necessities
that soil me forever.

No man is less free than a leader of men.
I did these things, and I’d do them again,
because I would have to. The power of choice
belongs to the powerless, the private voice
to the man no one listens to. My voice has been heard
in the foremost of councils, and not one word
I’ve spoken was mine. You’d do better to herd
sheep on a mountainside.

I’m sailing for home, now, home to the wife,
Clytemnestra; she, so deft with the knife,
and the carving of meat, and the touch under bedsheets.
She’ll bathe this blood off me; I’ll live on the sweetmeats
of my own lambs and cattle. I’ll shelve all this the plunder.
Let the others tell stories of blood and wonder—
the fine deaths of heroes, and Zeus’ thunder.
I’ll die in silence.