Oedipus

Elizabeth
Metzger

The sockets remind us lookers of his eyes.
We see him to see for him-
ourselves, our destiny in Oedipus.
We mourn our destiny
and hate ourselves in order to create;
afraid to die, we ply our eyes,
hold out the irony
all effort spent on a city’s riddles
and others’ plagues.
The truth is heard too late,
defaced, in agony.
What is the will but a paintbrush dipped in fate?
We are all the unfortunate child
rife with ruin and limp with life;
he is what might have been and all that was.
Intruding again into his own life
he bursts his ankles from the stakes,
the handles of the chamber door, the peplos pins-
we cry for him.
He can no longer cry.