Bitten -- Goddess sing of how the rescuing hand
was bitten by the radiant one it had rescued.
Taken from that son of Atreus who’d nursed and encouraged
her strangeness--
one belonging to the hidden face of Apollo--
his aspect called Smintheus, bringer of plagues,
lover of vermin, mice and rats.
Out of love and affection Paris mistook
Helen's unnatural beauty as would anyone have done.
Unwitting Paris allowed
that undisclosed unsavory characteristic to fester.
It flowered, swelled, consumed and conquered.
Had he known this, would Menelaus have sailed forth
to the beach before Ilium to confront
those unyielding Trojans behind their walls?
Would he have understood the cost of success?
The Gods, even they saw not the thing that grew
in the dark of a hold, where it claimed, one
after the other, the will of many among
Paris' crew, while the young prince, himself a moon-calf,
saw none of it. The ship sailed home.
It was Thersites
That hideous warrior, shamed by Odysseus
for his effrontery and foul language,
who first of all the armies fell victim
through his treasonous rage.
Wandering from the camp in the night, he
met the Spectre--
she who'd called Lacedaemon home
and until recently been locked
in the bowels of the city, its victim
now turned victimizer while Apollo,
their immortal guardian, slept.
Revenge, she would have it upon both sides.
Thersites recognized her not at all, having never set eyes
upon her till then. He drew his sword against
the shape, as it drifted nearer.
Close-up, like Paris he was smitten--
he, club-footed and double-humped,
had little experience with the fair sex,
alive or undead....