The Quest

The Quest

...for each of us has a Golden Fleece to seek,
and a wild sea to sail over ere we reach it,
and dragons to fight ere it be ours.
The Heroes, Charles Kingsley

And so we set out, heading for the Hellespont

and beyond—past the clashing rocks

towards the mist-filled darkness of the Eastern Sea

and the landscapes of the heart.

And, my child, we made it. We faced

the fire of the bulls’ breath,

the men who sprang from serpents’ teeth and were mown down

in the field of the war-god.

We broke into the garden.

“The rest”, we thought, “is easy.” But when we saw

the snake basking in the sunlight

at the foot of the tree we shivered, and gazed into its stare

with awe.

And with a horror so deep it dazed us. In its eyes

we saw ourselves—we couldn’t... No,

we couldn’t kill it. We lulled the beast to sleep

and took the Golden Fleece

like thieves.

Pavlos Andronikos

Published in Outrider vol. 4, no. 2 (Dec. 1987), p. 129. For an intriguing take on this poem, see “Transformative Identities of Literary Multiculturalism” by Manfred Jurgensen in Southerly, Mar 22, 1999.