Poem of the Spartan

I
----.
The Athenians march and sail
We march through dusty deserts
across burning battlefields
Spears hungry for their jewel-filled guts.

II
I remember my youth on the Eurotas waters
my first beard spiraling into its flow
After the days training in the sun
This must be our life
Equal in waters, limbs weary
leathery skin. Equal like gods cannot be.
Only in Lakedaemon.

Frenzied and sprinkling blood
We place these spears into the bellies
Of other men
The helm wrapped about my head
I will give to my son
and My son's son
Who shall sing of it in song
And suffer the weight of my sin
As I suffer now
The hubris of my grandfather
Who cast his wife into the river Eurotas.

III
When we let the Athenians
Take away their dead,
One went about calling for his son
To me darkly he said:
hast thou my son seen?
Is this his beautiful helm on your trophy?
He was as a god...
Is it the youth lying slain there? asked I,
He is much like unto a god...
The Athenian, woeful, took the spear
from the back of his son
Please, he said, impale him from the front,
For he did not die a coward, but as a god.
This I did, Hermes in blue came,
sped away with the boy's breath
So also shall Athens to its ruin go, I said,
Blame it on Archilochus whose verse you adore...
my son did not recite
the verse of Archilochus...
I then slew the man for mercy's sake
so he may drink with his son in Elysion

IV
I am not going to say
That the gods are innocent of bloodshed this day,
They filled war into my chest
They made us merciful to the enemy
I am Sopoliton king of Lakedaemon, son of Xapsytus
I compose verses in my tent
The equals do not know
Tonight I shall sing the song of my steed
Who drinks from the river Eurotas
Tonight the Muse from Parnassus will delight,
Tomorrow we lay seige to Plataea

V
Let me tell you of my steed Dandylon
Who drinks from the river Eurotas
Cooling his mane beneath the shady cypress
Let me speak of his long waiting
Untold of the beastly Gyrops
Who dwells in the caves of Kakon
Who drinks from the river Eurotas
Who sings the song of our longing
Who bewails the death of our brothers
And grows the beard of long living
Dandylon danced on the banks of the river
Tall mighty and proud,
Dandylon shed gold from his eyelashes
when he beheld the setting sun
As the sun sunk upon the pillars of night
Dandylon startled in sleep and neighed
Gyrops tore at his flesh afrenzied
In the dawn I came a mightily
Eyes weathered in the Bacchanal of night
In the dawn I came sorely
Upon the steed Dandylon lacerated and dead
I saw bees feasting on his carcass
upon the steed Dandylon once fair
Who drinks from the river Eurotas