THE BIRDS OF ARES, THE 1ST GOP DEBATE & UNCIVIL DISCOURSE

WHEN USING WORDS LIKE WEAPONS

“Polyphonte became a strix ‘that cries by night, without food or drink, with head below and tips of feet above, a harbinger of war and civil strife to men’". [1]



Night h’owls strix-like
turning upsides↑
down↓

©2015 Decaying, Mythologies; Descending Series stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
#6words #writeprompt #poetTues


notes
1. In the Greek myth, Polyphonte (screaming) gives birth to twin sons, Agrios (the savage) and Oreios (the beastly). This (language) grows in size and strength and showing no honor to god(s) nor human beings alike, proceeds wantonly insolent of all.  Money does that; so does using one’s words like bullets to ask “gotcha” type questions in a presidential debate.  When Trump says of Megyn Kelly, “you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever,”  he may have intended to imply that she used her words like bullets hunting prey. He may have meant, her medium, Fox News came screaming at him like the mythical Polyphonte. In her myth it is told she comes ready to feed on flesh and blood.  She is a metaphorical ‘bird of Ares’. In environs where the Fox News moderators of the GOP national debate willing tell afterword how they were targeting Trump, how they used their words to fire questions meant to draw blood (something Trump expresses metaphorically when he proclaimes he sees "blood coming out of her eyes" (Kelly's eyes) and also "wherever", also tells us it was a group effort to ask Trump such kinds of trivial questions with the specific goal of marginalizing his ideas we have yet to hear him address and repress his opportunity to address policy questions of any depth. How unfair to the entire citizen body and other candidates in the debate, moreover, not just GOP voters, but everyone else tuning in that night.  One can understand Trump's comment by knowing the minor Greek myth of Polyphonte.  As if like a bird of prey, warlike, Fox News came at Trump using words to formulate questions that moved like screaming bullets. In deed, a foul play; indeed, an uncivil discourse ensues.

 

2. For connections between law and the Strix, Lilith, vampires and Lamia images in collective, mythic imagination see Orit Kamir’s Every Breath You Take: Stalking Narratives and The Law, p55.

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[1] Oliphant, Samuel Grant (1913). "The Story of the Strix: Ancient". Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association (The Johns Hopkins University Press). pp. 133-34. See http://www.jstor.org/stable/282549?&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents accessed, August 11, 2015 at 9:29am.

A WOMAN WITH AN UNUSUAL PET

BRITOMARTIS

blessed she fled
foul to fish


©2015 Soft Terror In Six Words stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about a woman with an unusual pet. #6words  @Kelsye 

notes
The poem is titled “soft terror” to accent the early origin of this goddess in the mythologem of the mountain mother, Artemis. The Mother of Mountains is perhaps the earliest aspect of the Cretan goddess.  Given this context makes her “unusual” pet one that possesses the demon-like features of the gorgon.

THE PEACE OF HOMER

BY ATHENA'S COMMAND

boy no more, "Go!"
"Find him!"

©2015 Telemachus   stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
In SIX WORDS or fewer, write a story about leaving home. #6words #amwriting

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NOTES

Spiritual growth in Homer is related to the inheritance of a certain hardship brought to bear on families because of war.  The spiritual quest is a journey to the father, the one missing. “Go! Find him.”

THE FORGE IN THE HEART

Cupid's Forge, Edward Burne-Jones, 1861

FEBRUARY'S POETRY

In Cupid's forge
soul heats up.

©2015 To Thalia stephaniepope mythopoetry.com
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____________
notes

1. Assemble of Foules, Chaucer (Assembly of Fowls)

“Under a tree, beside a welle, I seye,
Cupide our Lorde, his arrows forge and file;
And at his feet his bow already lay;
And wel his doughter tempred al the while
The heddes in the welle; and with her wile
She couched hem after, as they should serve
Some to slee and some to wound and kerve,
Couched and arrayed in order sorted”

2.  During the Apollonic era of western civilization, Thalia retained the highest metaphor assigned as the era’s collective soul or inner image-pattern, “the music of the spheres”. The heart itself is a metaphor for the inner life of Thalia or soul-making's aesthetic, "poetic" sense. Each heart has its own intellect. One must bring one’s own intellect into Cupid’s Forge and into the service of Thalia’s psyche-making. And, as one can see from the painting, Thalia’s home lies within a fundamental darkness whereby Cupid’s crimson supplies bright love.

Then, too, I may suppose, should I lose contact with this soul of Thalia whereby a fundamental darkness roots me in the service of this other making, a making which allows her soul to displays its sense to me, the image of Thalia singing the music of the spheres would render—not Thalia but a Silent Thalia. I will not have heard her soul’s inner life singing within my heart its own soul logical felt-sense.

It is in such moments one’s own egoic desires must die back, become pruned like a vine or shorn like a lamb; one must become small again like a child in service to the inner life’s mastery and its space where her dark blossoming may bring new likeness into bloom and fruits in fleshed soul-making.