after “Scar Light” by Laura Benson
Apollo’s whip incites heat thunder,
its crack a drum that shakes the sky.
It’s barb strikes stars upon immortal steeds, carving bursts of light on velvet flanks.
Their hide once held the shade of night: true darkness, a boil of cosmic matter.
Their eyes a mirror of times before.
Wide backs fill with painful light,
stars seeping into day.
Their forms float, weightless.
Untacked, untethered, left victim to the wind— a fate not fit for beings of night.
Pure force sucked dry by the boy god’s whip.
Those with luck break free from flaming chains.
With lives that never fade away.
But some suffer a repeated fate, trapped in that spoiled boy’s palm.
Men who tear off butterfly wings gaze up from earth with eyes of greed,
and throw lassos forged in fire up high,
to drag him to the ground,
to pin him inside a frame.
They hang him in a darkened room,
his scars filling with dust.
Tears drip
from his cracked,
opal eyes.
They grow stalactites
of silver.