Free Hold Your Own by Kate Tempest Page B

somewhere,
    Scale and danger.
    Nature, sunglare.
    Faint, she takes a branch and holds it
    Steadies herself. Stills her shoulders.
    Snakes and sex and innocence
    And nothing really makes much sense.
     
    Who was I then?
    She watches awed.
    And grips the branch like it’s a sword.
     
    Believing.
    Believing.
     
    I should be leaving.
     
    She breaks the branch with sudden force.
    She swings the branch, and knows its course:
    The snakes, no chance, are soon divorced.
     
    A sudden dark and squelching tension.
    She panics, sweats, can’t breathe. Head pounds.
    Her body writhes and juts.
    No sounds.
     
    The image of her lover’s face
    Begins to shake and wilt and fade,
    She loses him, there, in the shade.
     
    It hurts. She’s felt this once before.
    She knows this pain, this change, this awe.
     
    She feels herself retract and harden.
    Feels her bones enlarging,
    Moving, arching.
    Something charging,
    She’s old milk bursting from its carton.
     
    Shaken, floored, a body heaving
    Writhing, smiling, something’s pleasing,
    Finding her throat open, screaming,
    Hoarse and full of light
    Her body stops. She feels his might.
    His veins thicken in intense delight.
     
    A man again.
    He stands, confused.
    And walks away.
    Too much to lose.
     
    This poor once-boy, sudden-woman,
    Who’d lived so long and done so well
    And kept so much so deeply hidden,
    Now found himself before the bell
    Of some new door in some new town.
    The pain of new beginnings.
    Everything that went before
    Gushed in him.
    Water overfilling.
     
    Smash the cup and let it happen.
     
    Tiresias.
    A full grown human.
    Moves on from what he cannot fathom.
    He swears his past will not consume him.
     
    And so the man with many pasts
    Matures into his present,
    But he feels his waters move
    In the last arc of the crescent,
    And as the moon expands to full
    He feels his blood respond,
    But as all humans know to do,
    He holds it in
    And soldiers on.
     
    Imagine how it feels
    To walk so far away from life and love,
    To know that all you’ve known
    Is now
    No longer enough.
     
    All the blood they’d bled,
    All the children they had borne,
    All the mouths their mouths had met,
    Behind them now.
     
    Forlorn,
    He staggers knee-deep through his pity
    Sadness grabs his shins.
    A stranger in a strangers’ city,
    Where new strangeness begins.
     
    In distant god terrain,
    Mount Olympus, pink and milky,
    Zeus and Hera fight again,
    Raw and honest, foul and filthy,
    Hera with her eyes screwed up
    I swear you’re out to kill me.
    She weeps and screams and he enjoys
    The feeling of his power.
    He froths and paces, thunders, pleads;
    Tempers frayed, their bodies need
    A break from fighting –
    But none comes.
    Not after this – another tongue
    Roasted in his total blaze.
    Surprise surprise, old Zeus has strayed.
     
    The fighting carries on for days.
     
    Down on Earth the weather’s mental.
    Hurricanes and ancient heat.
    Sudden freezes ice the deserts.
    Rain leaves craters in concrete.
    Hera’s ripping up her dresses.
    – Am I not enough for you?
     
    Zeus is melted, stares intently
    – Sister, you are all I love.
    – Then why?
    – Because these others tempt me.
    And unlike you, I lack the guts
    To turn away and know my path.
     
    Hera swigs straight from the cask,
    The nectar’s strong and soothes her heart.
    She sighs in disbelief, don’t start.
     
    Zeus, bored of being wrong and sorry,
    Puffs his chest up, shows his might.
    Hera knows his godly body
    Well enough to not take fright.
     
    I don’t know what the fuss is for
    Zeus begins, playing wounded.
    Women like it more than Men.
    I don’t even want to do it.
    What you get from me is more
    Than what I get from you.
     
    Red rag to a Minotaur.
     
    What? says Zeus. It’s true.
     
    They row like it’s a holy war,
    The Earth suffers their anger.
    Finally, when neither has
    The strength to raise the anchor
    And the ship of their relations
    Is broken-keeled and sinking,
    And they’re fighting over what the