My Epic Odyssey

Across the sea

Back home

I wish to flee

Away from my story that has become a tome

Fighting for my life

Fighting with my men

Fighting to see my son and wife

Fighting Poseidon through year ten

I’m just a man with a ship

With one destination in mind

Praying our feet and oars don’t slip

Our hands with nothing but blood and water to find

After a cyclops, sirens, goddesses and gods

All I want is my wife to hold

To beat the odds

Is making it back to them a wish too bold?

Seeing the shores of my island

Pushing my ores through water I have swam

Feet walking over familiar sand

Tears of relief in my eyes, damn

Seeing Argos guarding the palace doors

Face white and barely lifting his head

I greet him with pets as he too old to even get on all fours

I whisper “Your duty is finished, rest now, Argos.” And as soon as I walk past him he leaves to rest with the dead

Athena hides my face as a beggar

I must hold back my relief as the war is not done

I see Penelope again and it takes everything in me not to hold her

I present her the idea of a challenge to prove her husband to be the one

Hiding suitor’s weapons to settle the score

All those fail before I drop the mask and string my old bow

Stringing Athena’s webs of strategy and war

But it’s the wrath and might of Ares that I keep in tow

My palace sacked like Troy

No wooden horse in sight to burn

Just men with threats upon my wife and boy

Lose their lives with arrows in their throats making their last words too garbled with blood to discern

After my palace is painted red

I turn and see a man, my son

Grown up without his dad

But fighting side by side as a reunion

I hold him close to my chest

He tells me I’m different than the stories

I tell him he’ll get to know me now that I can rest

We no longer have any worries

I bathe to wash myself of the blood of lesser men

Penelope is waiting for me

But I am a changed man from who I was back then

But she has been in every dream

Waiting waiting waiting

We both have for 20 years

I hope her eyes will still be loving

Her hatred is one of my worst fears

I open the door to our chambers

Our eyes meet

Penelope’s guard wavers

The distance between us now only a few feet

I am not the man you fell in love with

I have killed and sacrificed to stand

More than I can say in a breath

Red streaks on every island’s sand

Would you fall in love with me again

Knowing all I have done

No longer the kind and gentle man you knew back then

After the monster I have become

But this task you as of me now

to move our wedding bed

Is the one thing I cannot allow

The olive tree grown with our love, everlasting, that I carved with the blood and sweat I shed

Oh my dear don’t test me like this, my heart can’t take the strain

Knowing I’m the only one that wouldn’t cut its roots

But in your voice I can hear your relief and pain

Sharing you’ll fall in love with me over and over again sounds like flutes

Your arms wrap around my shoulders

My arms around your waist

The waiting is finally over

Our lips crash like waves, both of us relearning the other’s taste

I’m your and you are mine

Penelope, my beloved wife

I will never leave your side

With you I will spend the rest of my life

Oh how I love you

I’ll repeat the words “I do”

As many times as I need to

After what we’ve both gone through

All credit to Jorge Rivera-Herrans and his beautiful creation of "EPIC: The Musical" that inspired this poem.