Everything’s reduced in proportion: we’re not warriors, after all,

and a long way, in armchairs on Christmas leave,

from where famous and forgotten cities are falling.

But we too drop shields, gauntlets, greaves

to watch daytime TV with the elderly in their shawls,

and rummage through their meds.  The red mist of battle doesn’t leave

much behind these days: it just descends like a pall

of despondency, remonstrations, guilt-edged peeves;

and the things that angered us seem just as trivial, won,

just as important, lost, as Briseis was to her captor.

Take this morning, for example: a proud parent’s rebuff

of my offer to stock the fridge brought the chapter

to the heights of epic with my dummy-spitting and gruff

response to the envoys asking me to find the walking stick for Agamemnon.

​

Locative Magazine Issue 6 October 2026