POETRY JAM - OLYMPIAN

“Gender is between your ears and not between your legs.” - Chaz Bono
 

Poetry Jam this week has invited participants in the creative writing challenge to write “an Olympian poem”. I have chosen the definition of “Olympian” that pertains to the ancient Greek deities that resided on Mount Olympus. The poem does have a twist, though…
 

Marsyas
 

Hubris, Apollo will most mercilessly punish,
And the wretch Marsyas was flayed for it.
 

The haughty Olympian would not stand
To hear another note of the accursed reed’s shrill melody,
Even if the playing were the most accomplished.
The sweet-tempered lyre was too feeble, too sedate,
To compete with the brilliance of the woodwind
And the angered god, slighted, skinned the better player.
 

My pale smooth skin is offensive to my soul,
A violation of my mind’s image of the body it should inhabit.
The hairless breasts, the rounded curves, the full red lips
Beautiful, yet unsuited to my mannish brain that would brawn.
Virile Apollo incarnated was in woman’s flesh
And lyre she plucks placidly with polished nails.
 

A brash Marsyas within the heart that aches to play,
And so as to right the centuries of wrong,
Compels the sharpened nails to flay herself
In order to reveal the true self that hides within:
A strident march more attuned to his shrill notes
Than the short-shrift notes of her gentler lyre.
 

I was an egg, so full of promise, that hatched into a vile larva;
The only remedy, a chrysalis carrying within it promise of butterfly.
 

Footnote
In Greek mythology, the satyr Marsyas (Ancient Greek: Μαρσύας) picked up the double flute (aulos) that had been abandoned by Athena and played it. He became so adept at it that he challenged Apollo (the god of light, art and music and lyre player) to a contest of music. Marsyas lost the contest against the Olympian and Apollo flayed Marsyas alive. In Antiquity, literary sources often emphasise the hubris of Marsyas and the justice of his punishment.
 

Transgender is the state of one’s gender identity (self-identification as woman, man, neither or both) or gender expression not matching one’s assigned sex (identification by others as male, female or intersex based on physical/genetic sex). Transgender is independent of sexual orientation; transgender people may identify as heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, or asexual; some may consider conventional sexual orientation labels inadequate or inapplicable to them.
 

The painting above is Jusepe de Ribera’s (1591-1652) “Apollo Flaying Marsyas”.