The Siren Songs

 

With rope and wax and misplaced trust

you mute our songs to choke your fear

and think to buy our silence here

with artful schemes and stifled lust;

how quaintly defiant of you

to stop your ears with wax -

so ply your oars and bend your backs

as all the while

the cruel wind roars and the darkness cracks

around you, our silence bought with your guile,

and hempen ropes to bind you fast;

trussed like fools to your oars and mast.

As if that would arm you against us!

Such false security lulls.

For the bees that laboured to make the wax

also created the golden honey

that our singing pours into your skulls.

Those same bees are our allies

and scheme against your fires.

See: you need only to gaze upon us,

and your brains boil with your desires.

White-hot, the wax melts, and you are helpless:

you hear our songs, and from that moment you are ours.

Did you really seriously imagine

that you always would have things your way?

It has been millennia; thousands of years

of being denied our true selves through your fears.

Thousands of years of our bodies’ violation,

of keeping us safely confined to our station

and doing for you what is meet

with rules made by men in the name of their god

then claiming such writings as his holy word,

and even of being afraid of our hair

as under your rules we all have to wear

hats in church, hijabs on the street:

a denied womanhood in your vanity fair.

So just go ahead:

you can stop your ears with wax

and listen to nothing instead,

you can bind yourselves to the mast.

But the bees work with us in dark alliance

and are on our side,

so now you must see us at last:

our hair is a long, flowing flag of defiance,

the banner of a justice long denied.

And now you taste at last

the same fear we have tasted

these centuries past.

Centuries of fear in lifetimes wasted:

of not being free to walk the streets at night,

our movements confined by a curfew nightfall

because your desires seized a stolen requite:

desires which were not true desires at all.

So you can stop your ears with wax

but you cannot quench the fire.

For remember the bees work against you

as does your desire.

White-hot and melting together

The centuries hear our songs

and the moon will finally take her rest

where the moon belongs.

And we who have borne these many wrongs

feel in the rush of time

the raging wind of our wings

and the unfolding sublime.

And whether you choose to or not

you will listen to our songs

and the moon will find her rest at last

where the moon belongs.

©David Bergen Studio

(In Homer’s epic ‘The Odyssey’, to sail his ship safely past the sirens’ island and avoid their fatal singing that would lure both himself and his crew to their watery deaths, Odysseus has his men stop their ears with wax. Curious to hear their songs he has himself bound to the mast with instructions that, however much he pleads to be freed, he was not be released until they were safely past the hazard.)