☀ Today's Poem: "The War Mule's Account" Ishion Hutchinson

Now, my business is to cart the dead
from both sides of the Scamander River.
No easy task going through the bustle; spearheads
whizzing my ears – but me, Balthus, I deliver.

My allegiance is to the shades, though I favour
braggadocious Aias (see, I was born behind the walls
now burning), and I like that cadaver-maker,
son of Thetis, the only man out there with balls.

But I hate those snooty black horses in armour,
plumed kingly, stamping fetlocks in the war horde –
those belly-up bastards adored like a good rumour
circling the battlefield, half-happy, half-bored

with the attention showered on them, even by the dying:
‘Bless, O gods, let winged Pegasus take me home,’
cried one pathetic brute as his soul came flying
off a bronze dagger that halved his helmet and dome.

I hate especially those so-called immortals,
dropping tears over cut-down Patroklos,
tossing long manes, but never lifting a morsel
of his to the funeral pyre. Man, I cuss

under the heft of Achaeans’ and Trojans’ weight
I take to the heap; I cuss the carrion kites
and cuss the baying mongrels in wait;
I cuss the long ten years of useless fight.

Yet I harness on, unnoticeable through ranks,
last witness of the city’s defeat by a wooden giant,
watching long boats set off on the defiant
Aegean, with loot and women, for distant
islands, not one ever saying ‘Thanks.’