March 11 - St. Homer, Primal Bard

This was his life, his day in the tempest of time.  When men lived in the liver of darkness, when civilization had not yet stretched its discontents into the womb.  When the sun scratched its way up the hill of the sky and Apollo, the god who sings while we mortals tumble over our mistakes to our bed of worms, clawed his lust into Adara, a common goatherd, near Smyrna on the Sardis plains.

He stood on the cliff of youth, having seen his father once riding the sky’s rough chariot through a rip in the laws that divide the sight of men and gods; having watched marauders hack and burn his mother’s herd, stake her to the bed with greedy seed and drag her body through lechery’s hours to lightless death.

Aphrodite was bored one afternoon and peered over Heaven’s balustrade to laugh at man’s affairs.  Look¾there was Homer in the fields picking the scabs of his gloom, bitching that his paternal blood hadn’t cast him for a better fate.

He’d do.  She’d throw love at him; the afternoon was going to be all right.

Even Apollo took time out from poisoning his arrows to sit down with the other gods and laugh at his son’s lobotomy.  Sure, the gods lose their minds too when passion stalks, but for them it doesn’t matter; the only consequence might be on earth¾a hurricane, genocide¾nothing that upsets the senior scales.

Anyway, there was Homer, getting married, with his brain left behind in some temple toilet.  Five months into the fiasco, he found her in bed with a Sminthean priest, so he slit the throat of this brute who stole his love and left the comforts of matrimony to wander in blood’s kingdom.

Vengeance against the human race became his vow.  His goals were drifting and death.

A migrant family passed him on the road, he nailed their feet together and threw them in the earth.  Boys leaping off a cliff into summer water.  He put arrows through three of their heads mid-air and got the rest of them tripping on their fear.  Seven Ephesian women washing their children’s clothes, he amputated and raped them; their spirits crept back to dust.   Entire towns were his specialty; gaining access to the leader was easy¾he had a lizard’s tongue and an oiled mind, knew how to camouflage himself in other people’s wills.  Once he slaughtered the kingpin, the townsfolk fell like sheep.  The flies descended to their feast.

He joined an army and marched on Megara, the inhabitants found death on spikes.  In Argos the children were chained and burned while the adults hung upside down, nailed to their houses.  Messene:  citizens force-fed frogs until they gagged to bitter night.  The eyes of Theban lovers were shoved in their beloveds’ mouths, the beloveds’ tongues stuffed in their lovers’ sockets like grotesque hors d’oeuvre.  Patra became a synonym for carnage, Beroira an experiment in pain.  He scalped the Chacisian children and threw their brains to dogs, cooked the dogs’ stomachs and made the parents eat.  Old women were fed to pythons, young women thrown down wells with sewn mouths.  He’d lure youth into a gang, telling them they’d rule the world, and train them in the arts of siege and carnage.  Then he’d creep from his tent under the moon’s embers and drive a flaming javelin through his students’ heads.  A passing chariot was an invitation for bloodshed, an old man an opportunity for gravediggers.  He slit throats like bananas, counted murder among the tasks that made a man.

Homer, crammed with anger, many-sided son.

Zeus and Hera shocked Olympus by uniting for once and campaigning to kill Homer and stop this usurpation of the murderous rights of immortals, but another odd alliance, Aphrodite and Apollo, developed stratagems to delay the inevitable … they thought the kid was good for more amusement.  Plus, Apollo loved him; his romp with Adara was still wet on his mind.

But after ten years of song and slaughter, Zeus said he’d had enough … Homer would die that afternoon.  So Apollo grabbed him while He Who Thunders was raping some temple priestess, and locked him in the couch of the sun.  For entertainment, he gave his son a present, a mirror in which he could see everything he’d done¾the whole grisly mess parade before him, on endless repeat.  Each day—another bloodbath, each night—more rapes and screams.  Homer didn’t flinch.  He didn’t pray.  Didn’t weep, repent … as he watched his useless life strut on and on.  He wrote.  Dipped his pen in the human soul.  Looked in Apollo’s mirror and wrote with the ink of night his life and lives and life.

The sun rolled down the sky’s greasy back into the vast vat at earth’s hard edge.  St. Homer too stumbled to blindness, hissed to death in the river that’s always cold … brave bard, who lived to tell the human tale.

Who was born this day?

What bedraggled horror crawled from cold silence to cling to words’ pale fire?

Only this … the rumor of a man, a story.

Let us honor them today with our souls and flesh.