It was Helen’s face that
launched a thousand ships,
but you unleashed Achilles.

How were you to know that
poets would sing of his rage?
– that innumerable men would
meet their deaths at the end of
his grief-stricken spear?

How were you to know when you
went to battle in his armor that
you would never return to him?
– that you had brought about his
death as surely as your own?

He wept –
and his mother in the depths
of the sea heard his cries.
He wept –
and he dirtied his face,
and tore at his hair, and wished for death.

Eternal glory was not worth the price he paid.
It was not worth the loss of you,
Patroclus, whom he loved as his own life.

What was Achilles to do when his heart
burned with you on the pyre?
What was he to do when his home became
nothing but ashes in a golden urn?

He was nearly a god –
son of a goddess, best of the Greeks.
He fell to an arrow, the poets say,
guided by Apollo himself.
The poets are wrong.

He was nearly a god –
but he was mortal, and he fell to that
great mortal weakness: love.
You would have followed him anywhere, even into death.
You must have known that he would do the same.