ELEGY FOR ISKIA

ELEGY FOR ISKIA, CITY OF GARDENS’ SHADE, by Mendax of Iskai, translated by Cullen Groves, pending artwork by Miguel Santos

 

Fair were the gardens of Iskia: sweet with the asphodel’s fragrance,

Filled with the hymns of the bees happily working the flowers,

 

Shadow of myrtle and coolth of the clear flowing spring at its roots,

Wine in my cup, on my breath, couched with a girl in my arms,

There I’d recline forever, forever returning to home, and

These are the things that I long for, lying in ivory of yore;

Aye, and I long for the storms of the mountains shaking the pines, or

Cormorants spreading their wings, crouching on massifs of stone

 

Slave of Enyalios the spear-god, long have I wandered, lonely,

Drinking unmixéd wine won by the point of my spear–

Gone the delights of the gardens of youth and the savor therein,

Haunting me always in dreams, sleeping, awake, or at march

Long have I wandered away from my city, far from her bosom,

Suckling the teats of kings, suffetes, and senates for gold

 

Offering the guest-privilege of dark Hades’ halls at the eagle’s feast,

Salting the earth with foes’ blood, black like the bread of the dead

 

Never again shall I breathe the sweet air of my birthplace in Helas,

Not since the tyrants have raped, ruined white Iskia’s beauty

Ashes like snow now blanket the gardens, and jackals are circling,

Howling and laughing her doom; Iskia’s dead to me,

 

Buildings like white-washéd sepulchers rising o’er gardens of ashes,

Bones of a city, sun-bleached, cracked by the lions’ foul teeth

 

All that remains are the white-budded asphodels, flowers immortal,

Sending their odors through streets stretching away unto death

________________________________________

Mendax was a man of Iskian descent during the age of the tyrant-kings Anaxes and Iskander. He served as a soldier in the armies of both; first under Anaxes, and then as a captain of spearmen with Iskander in that king’s eastern conquests. Though he claimed a noble lineage, he bore Anaxes’ name tattooed on one hand like a slave; and when he had finished serving as a soldier, he is said to have turned pirate. Despite his martial pursuits, he was also known as a composer of poems and songs. Here, he sings of his home city Iskia after its destruction, as fated by the tyrants who illegally seized power there.

Cullen Groves lives with his wife and three children in Moscow, Idaho, where he graduated from the University of Idaho with a degree in philosophy. He has had several poems, including a small epic, published by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly; as well as a couple placed elsewhere. The language in which Mendax composed was very like a dialect of the Greek Koine; as a mere amateur regarding ancient Greek, Cullen hopes that he has translated acceptably the mood, meter, and imagery of the original.

 

Miguel Santos is a freelance illustrator and maker of Comics living in Portugal.  His artwork has appeared in numerous issues of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, as well as in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 2.  More of his work can be seen at his online portfolio and his instagram.