the theban

[constantine]

deny the gods
but not their attributes
for these are eternal
and can reach across the millennium
with an impact, so profoundly ironic,
as to reveal not only a divine presence
but our own flickering mortality

like death, you can't avoid them
though you run desperately
for a thousand years,
just as the theban
who chases his fate,
as others offer tribute
to the scylla and charybdis
of hand to mouth -
no more, no less will do

and the horror of his innocence
exposed the gods themselves,
perpetrators of what no man deserves,
but inherits still - the bounty
buried precisely at the spot
where character surely will propel him -
the ambush, patiently waiting
at the crossroads of the damned

[stilltrucking]

I love it when you get down to your roots. I think it is one of your most authentic tropes.
I guess I will have to google tropes and see if that is the best word for what I meant.

Emily Dickinson (1830–86). Complete Poems. 1924.

Part One: Life

CXIV

FATE slew him, but he did not drop;
She felled—he did not fall—
Impaled him on her fiercest stakes—
He neutralized them all.

She stung him, sapped his firm advance, 5
But, when her worst was done,
And he, unmoved, regarded her,
Acknowledged him a man.