Robin Robertson

for Catherine Lockerbie

Late January, and the oak still green, the year already wrong. The season miscarried – the lambs in the field, and the blossom blown – the whole year broken before it began, and me standing where winter should have been: a reived man, a man forspoken.

A woman’s kiss will lift you all morning. A woman’s curse will grave you to hell.

By the...

after Nonnus

Born to a life of dying, the boy-god’s first death came when he could barely crawl, the budding horns just there, nudged among curls, as he played on the floor with his toys: a knuckle-bone, ball and spinning top, golden apples, a tuft of wool, and on his other side, the thunderbolts of Zeus.

They entered the throne-room’s dark, their round...

after Nonnus

I

Her only home was here in this forest, among the high rocks, sending her long arrows in flight through the standing pines as if threading nets in the air. She’d never seen a cup of wine or a perfumed room, or a bed: she drank chill water from the mountain brook and had only ever lain with lionesses, newly delivered of their cubs, who licked her hard white body, whimpering...

after Nonnus

Horned child, double-born into risk, guarded by satyrs, centaurs, raised by the nymphs of Nysa, by the Hyades: here he was, the toddler, Dionysus. He cried ‘Daddy!’ stretching up to the sky, and he was right and clever, because the sky was Zeus his father, reaching down.

As he grew, he learned to flit through other forms; he’d become a newborn kid, shivering in...

after Nonnus

Hardened by the hills of Phrygia, quickened by its streams, the boy-god Dionysus came of age.

And as his own body changed his eyes grew wider, and turned towards the bodies of others. Ampelos was the one, above all: most beautiful boy, most beautiful of satyrs: lean and long and new. Even his flaws were gorgeous: the bony nubs at the forehead, that slight skip in his step,...