Penelope

Trivial are the cries of an old wife's heart

To one who lives to listen to the screams of his own.

 Caught in Neptune's thrall till the end of his days;  

I linger and ebb.

The hearth has long ceased its restless murmurs, 

Time's careless chisel has chipped at my youth; 

he finds me unseemly.

'Tis is his senescence that forestalls him from discerning,

The cold hand of Age on his forehead.

But aids him,

In discerning the caresses of Time on my person.

Like a fitful child, he writhes out of the grasp of Duty.

His heart harkens to the tempestuous call of travel;

He is slave to the qualms of adventures.

He shall never belong,

With me, with our son, with his people. 

He casts away his worldly ties like pebbles, 

Paltry as they are to him,

He cares not for me, 

A trifle for my affections.

His meandering soul has encountered much, glimpsed more. 

But all that he has gleaned, 

A puddle to the colossal ocean of that he has not,

Has stirred up the boiling cauldron of his wanderlust.

Twenty years, I have waited, holding a candle to his homecoming.

A mere vassal was I, 

A dewy bud awaiting the spring of his return,

And now I am served with my reward: 

He has abandoned me.

Ah, woe is me! 

I chide myself for having longed for his return,

For having prayed for the safety of so supercilious a man.

Parcae's derisive hilarity marks my days and dreams,

I shall forestall their laughter, 

I shall not pine for him anymore.

Counsel is my Telemachus' need of the hour: he has been deserted too.

As a parting gift, he has been awarded the crown,

Unwieldy which was for the head on which it sat.

His encumbrances weighed him down so,

His abandon commanded him to forsake us.

Telemachus, now reigns over the race he deemed primeval,

He, whose seafaring eyes had glanced the ways of the refined,

 He, whose hands shrunk from brewing them into the genteel.

But his son will not.

 He is the summer to his father's winter.

Twenty years had he been abandoned, and now, once more.

He walks life in measured steps; he had not his father's vagrant heart.

He will come to be the shepherd of his people, 

He earns their reverence each day.

His heart is moored to the people, his father's, to the world unseen. 

Mine is now mine and my son's.