Because of Aphrodite
~ from Liddell-Scott-Jones, βάλλω (ballō)
The force with which something
can be thrown, the release, the
sweep of arm and wrist—a
javelin in games, a
heavy spear in combat,
or battering blows of
winds, and these gusts, too: rain,
desire, wildfire’s roaring,
fear, and fast-falling stone-
cold night in lands of bone-
hard darkness and screaming
storm blasts that freeze the blood.
But in our stillness, a
gnat’s wings buzz, strings of an
ancient lyre resound in
pink earphones, and the small-
of-the-back bay at sun-
down is trembling, racing
dolphins leap and blow as
they surface on screen for
an instant, and real wings
of an eagle beat up
from the sea to our bluff,
it climbs up the air, we
hear three strokes and it’s gone,
from some far rocky point
your eyes flash, from bright forge
and through wood smoke we’re both
hurled——
[Published in The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry, edited by Eleanor Wilner and Maurice Manning, Univ. of Michigan Press, 2013, pp. 110-111]
Eros, Who Cannot Be Thwarted
~ Sophocles, fragment 684, LCL 483
overpowers not just
and unjust human beings
only, but animals
too and gods—whose breath trembles,
shakes, stops, bursts, when he wings
into them, at times coming
from great distances to
their culmination. Sometimes
Great Zeus Himself retreats
from the overthrowing come-
liness of the mortal
body—He Himself is far
too weak—even He!—to
ward off Eros. Even He
wants, more than anything,
anything, just to give in.
[This is a reworking of a fragment included in Sophocles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments, translated and introduced by Reginald Gibbons, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 27]