The Minotaur Speaks
Christopher Bernard
Bernard Page 1
 
[Listen to a reading of this poem.]

In the darkness a line glimmers~
    like a piece of spider silk, a tendril of its web~
          quivers and pulls
                     around another corner,
        then disappears into the gloom,
trembling in the rancid darkness, hot and stale as a cellar, binding the random corners of my chaotic home.

At one end clings the man the gods have sent to kill me~
(we'll see about that!)~but the thread's other end
                          winds and coils and shines,
                  leading . . . where?

  Oh, farther into the maze where father Minos left me,
  the bestial child his whore of a wife, my mother
     Pasiphae,

 dropped nine months after coupling with the Thracian bull
 whose member she had coveted~
                                       mating monster with monster,
how did they expect to escape having a monster for their
   offspring!


And so Minos threw me into this foul place,
             scrawled into confusion like a ball of tangled yarn,
no one can find a way out of, no matter how brave or
   cunning,
          a darkness I explore to find but deeper darkness,
and there left me, to feed on sacrificial virgins,
the beautiful, pure-skinned children of the Greeks.

    I trip over their bones as I bang from wall to wall,
    lost, hungry, bellowing in the dark,