Great Goddesses Read online

  Athena is who I will tell her to look for.

  I will take her to the library,

  and introduce her to every librarian

  because they are where Athena lives now.

  Pallas and Athena

  They named her ‘virgin’

  for they could not handle her autonomy

  in her carnality, her preference.

  She shunned Gods and men alike,

  so they rumoured her chaste,

  but perhaps their dismissal was in haste.

  Her desires lay elsewhere, you see.

  A girl just like her, but born of the sea.

  Fire in her eyes, a mouth made for war cries,

  long silver hair like her merman father,

  both of then raised under his mild but firm hand,

  for Triton was a better parent than Zeus even as a foster.

  Their days filled with rituals of steel and sacrifice

  melted away into nights filled with worship,

  holding each other like a prayer unspoken;

  this was floating in the cloud,

  this was every flavour of a star bursting,

  two girlhoods linking into a womanhood unbroken.

  But fate does not allow an immortal

  the luxury to love a mortal forever,

  not even if they promise it to each other.

  A friendly spar before the Gods that should

  have ended in two accomplished warriors

  being blessed by the divinity that was watching,

  ends instead in a diversion, a mistake, an impaling. Rivers of crimson on an aegis, turning the marble

  it touches holy, a lover holding the body of a lover,

  cursing providence and promising

  if she could not have her,

  then there would never be another.

  If you want to know the sinews

  of the eternity in a love

  crafted woman to woman,

  ask Athena why she never loved again,

  and why she carries that sobriquet ahead

  of her own name, first Pallas, then Athena.

  The Birth of Ares

  What else could have come

  from a love that became so brutal

  even the skies pelted hailstones

  and hurricanes when they fought?

  Confrontation. Combat. Combustion.

  Still the son of two of the mightiest Gods.

  But a child born of such rage

  will always smell of sulphur and damage.

  The God he becomes stands on

  warcries and bones and death

  in a battlefield. Who else could he be

  with the eternal screaming in his head?

  War and Poetry

  Ares, of warfare, soldiers, tributes,

  Ares, of carnage, widow-making

  and eternal cries, the sickening sound

  of a sword sinking to flesh,

  Ares, God of terrible things.

  Ares, of screams, of screams,

  of screams.

  It is the mothers’ prayers that sent her

  to him. They prayed for clemency, mercy

  to any softer God listening and it is

  Calliope who heard their inconsolable pain.

  This compassionate Goddess of poetry,

  oldest of the Muse sisters ascended Olympus

  to reason with the God of War,

  even to spar with him if need be.

  Instead, she found him, clutching his head,

  unable to stand the carnage within him,

  teeth clenched, close to screaming.

  She asked him why, why he couldn’t stop,

  and he lifted his head, eyes red, and said,

  ‘No one taught me how to stop the bloodshed,

  the clash of metal, the battle cries,

  and all the tragedy and the screaming.’

  So Calliope tenderly took his hands

  away from his head, and whispered to him

  a soothing story in verse. Calliope, alone

  who he listened to, who helped him fell

  each demon in his head and brought

  peace to the God of War and the earth.

  To this day if a conflict ceases, it is thanks

  to the kindness of Calliope, Goddess of Epic Poetry,

  bringer of peace, infusing kindness gently

  steeped with poetry to soothe a tired War God’s head.

  Ares, After

  Sometimes I pray for the living in me,

  And sometimes I pray for the dead.

  His father refused to tell him any stories, and his mother would never sing him any lullabies. They were both negligent. Perhaps this is why he turned out the way he did.

  At least, that’s what his therapist thought.

  He should have been at his happiest, really. Humans never stop going to war and his name is forever etched in their blood. Battlefield after battlefield donates souls to his cause. Countries continue to fight over manmade borders. Some name each other foe and then friend, then the foes are friends and the friends foes.

  And they have the audacity to call the Gods fickle.

  But Ares knows the truth now, the force that drives this. War makes the very wealthy richer so they engineer thousands of them.

  It should have pleased him to still have tributes when the others have none.

  Instead, he was tired. All the time. What he was God of was against his own nature. He didn’t want to be the reason why young men lost their lives because old men said they had to. He didn’t want greed to win. The non-stop screaming, the clang of metal against metal was going to kill him, he was sure of it.

  It was what he prayed for every night.

  He spent longer in bed that he needed to these days. Lost job after job because all he knew was chaos and this mortal world was obsessed with order. He was ordered by the court to go to a therapist because of the last bar fight he was in. If there was something he still knew how to do, it was brawl.

  The only job he could keep was illegal boxing, where there were no rules. Well, there were two rules. Rule 1: Leave the other man worse off, and Rule 2: Try to get out alive. It paid well and he never lost. He tried not to think about the crimson blood on his knuckles being the last time a man was seen alive.

  It’s how he kept his apartment. Bottles littered the floor. His therapist gave him Prozac for intermittent explosive disorder. He didn’t know that it takes more than a whole bottle at once to sedate a God. Ichor doesn’t take kindly to antidepressants.

  He is lonely beyond lonely. Every organ in him cries out for someone who knows him for who he was without demanding he make use of his terrible powers. Who will want you like this, he thinks disgustedly as he stares at his tired face in the mirror. Everyone who has ever loved you has never been able to tolerate your company. They called you a stupid brute on Olympus, made you feel unworthy of being Zeus’s son for good reason.

  He has never been more powerful than any of the others and he has never felt more lost.

  His powers are suitable for a general at war. On this human plane, in this bustling city, he feels like another face in the crowd.

  Sometimes Aphrodite visits him.

  She is still beautiful and she is thriving. All these New Age tools have only made her stronger. There are eight billion mortals looking for a real love to keep her powerful. Aphrodite knows how to adapt the way water does. It makes sense. After all, she was born of the sea.

  Once, when she visits, she asks him, ‘Why are you so unhappy? You could have it all, a job in military intelligence, a mansion, a thousand women.’ She has not been jealous since she discovered Hephaestus is the only one who will ever h
old her heart. What she doesn’t tell him: ‘You don’t have to live like this.’

  Do you think War-Gods ever long for contentment? Do you think peace ever makes its way into their souls?

  He wants to reach for her because she is the only shining being who cares. But that would be the loneliness talking again. ‘I want none of it.’ He doesn’t say, ‘I want someone who stays.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she asks him, gently.

  ‘I want what you and Hephaestus have,’ he says to her. ‘A love of equals that knows all of me, but doesn’t judge me for my regrets. A love that knows I would never ever judge them and love them completely.’

  Aphrodite smiles like the enigma she is. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

  She’s gone before he can ask what she is talking about.

  Days later, he is sitting in a club, drinking after a fight. He’s sat at this same place for centuries now. Things have changed, people have changed, the owners have changed. But there is still a comfort here, a familiarity he clings to. It’s open mic night and poet after musician takes the stage. He isn’t listening, his head addled in whisky.

  He hears her before he sees her.

  Eloquence personified, Homeric in her hymn, she weaves the tale of the God of War and a Muse who once loved each other. How somewhere in the sands of time through all this change, they lost each other. When she brings her tale to a close, the audience breaks out of the spell and so does he.

  Heart pounding, he raises his glass in her direction, and she makes her way through the audience to him.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Ares.’

  He inhales sharply as she reaches over and hugs him, stiffening but then melting into her arms. It felt like a burden as heavy as what Atlas carried was slipping from his shoulders. . . He raises his bruised knuckles to touch her face. “It is good to see you, Calliope. Would you like to join me for a drink?’

  Her hand gently settling on his as it touched her skin. She looks at her watch and smiles. ‘Why not? We only have forever.’

  Craving (A synonym for Aphrodite)

  Who can say craving without

  letting their tongue dance past

  the lust within the vowels.

  A stirring, something primal,

  one of the few things we have

  left in common with animals.

  Perhaps it makes sense then,

  the story of her birth sounds

  so vulgar. How the sea waves

  that became her mother

  mixed with the still-bloodied

  parts that were once her father.

  Danger. Everything about her

  spelled the kind of danger

  that could make order crumble.

  Of course, they would try to crush

  what they couldn’t understand.

  Not when the hunger in her alone

  could swallow up every God,

  every woman, every man,

  every person, the whole universe.

  The Goddess of Love: Aphrodite

  She is supposed to be love.

  The perfection of it.

  The embodiment of it.

  The splendour of it.

  Mortals and Gods alike

  look at her and think,

  how marvellous it must be

  to be the Goddess of Love.

  Aphrodite, the Goddess

  of breathless romances,

  of honeyed breaths,

  of feverishly promised forevers.

  They are too blind to see

  how often love is smoke

  and mirrors, used to ensnare

  like a hunter does a stag.

  Aphrodite, the Goddess

  of unrequited ruins,

  of lifetimes of unhappiness,

  of forgotten fallen kingdoms.

  What good is it to be the Goddess

  of Love when you cannot be

  the Goddess of Kindness,

  of pure intentions too?

  Love and War

  Who else was it going to be

  other than him when I am me?

  We are both destruction and evolution,

  endings and beginnings.

  The universe plots to bring

  those who can heal each other together.

  Yet I do not call this healing.

  This is something else.

  A challenge. Unpredictable. With the others,

  it is easier to keep pieces of myself.

  Hermes got my humour and hubris,

  Adonis my purity and passion.

  Ares took all of me and made my heart sore.

  Because it is untrue what they say.

  Nothing is fair in love or war.

  Aphrodite’s Gift

  Of course, it was Prometheus who shaped us

  from the most resilient of clay, and Athena

  who made our lungs glow with life.

  But while the Gods drank in celebration

  their minds were too preoccupied

  with the tributes they had not yet received

  to notice that one of them was missing,

  that one of them had disappeared to where

  Prometheus lived, a place made of river and wood.

  There in a moonlight-steeped workshop, she lifted

  each clay figurine with a cryptic smile on her lips,

  a red glow emerging from her hands as she did.

  Prometheus may be the father to us all,

  and Athena our giver of life. But Aphrodite

  is responsible for the gift that wrecks us all:

  our fragile, hard-loving, hard-falling,

  dangerous-to-grip and difficult-to-lose,

  spellbinding but treacherous hearts.

  Night Songs to Aphrodite

  ‘Aphrodite,’ I pleaded to the moon-

  drenched night sky.

  ‘Tell me, if love is meant to heal,

  then why does it destroy those who choose it?’

  From somewhere beyond the clouds,

  I heard the Goddess laugh.

  And I knew.

  Aphrodite, After

  Passion is lovely, lilting and limited.

  Love requires more elegant effort

  and whole eras dedicated to it.

  She is a dichotomy,

  the Goddess of both.

  Elegant. That’s the way they describe her. Always in cream suits that complement her dark skin, long hair tied back gracefully in a bun, one would almost miss the magnetic nature of her eyes. But no one could ignore the primal pull in their stomachs when she walked into a room.

  For her part, she takes it as a sign of reverence, a new form of tribute. She is the owner of one of the most forward-thinking dating companies after all.

  Aphrodite is nothing if not good at adapting. Love has always been about adaptation and evolution. It is hate that never changes. Even the Gods know how to change, how to leave when home becomes a place you cannot remember happiness any more.

  They had all been lost when they departed Olympus. Eros had fallen into despair as the ambrosia that kept Psyche alive had lost its power. She died as she was born. Earth bound.

  He had spent ten years walking the world a hermit. His arrows lay forgotten in the dust of the Sahara somewhere. When she had finally found him, he was a shadow of the God he had left behind.

  Her beautiful boy was despondent, sitting in a dark, dingy alley when she found him. ‘No one knows how to love here,’ he rasped, and she felt the crushing weight of his sheer disappointment. ‘Everything is artificial in this broken realm.’

  She touched his forehead, caked with dirt, with sand, with grease. ‘Of course they don’t know how t
o love. That is why we still exist. For it is our job to show them.’

  Somewhere, a man and the only man he has ever truly loved are celebrating fifty years together. Somewhere else, a girl falls in love with her best friend and finally kisses her. It still feels like the whole world goes silent when two people tell each other they love each other for the first time, even when it does not think those people should be together.

  Love can never die, not completely. There were too many romantics, too many poets, too many places where lovers could meet and kisses could be shared.

  There is still love to be found here. It just needs someone to whisper it back to life. This is spell work. It is time-consuming, full of errors . . .

  . . . but it is not impossible.

  They play mortals at their own games. It’s Hephaestus’s idea. Mortals are the Gods’ novelties who are, in turn, always enraptured by novelties; an easy way to manipulate them is to hold what they are looking for just out of reach.

  Perfection in imperfection. Someone whose flaws work well with yours. Infuse modern love with the hues of older romance. An agency that offers something real in a world that was increasingly becoming plastic. Aphrodite puts her powers into information superhighways with the help of nymphs who have adapted to learn code. Brontes the Cyclops helps Eros to convert his arrows into algorithms.

  All of this is built on such a whim, it is a wonder that it works.

  Slowly, she watches the soft blue of love rise in mortal after mortal. Eros never misses.

  It feels like she has finally found her peace. The cruelty in her has turned to kindness. Hephaestus’s gentle love has seen to that. And yet . . .

  Something she cannot name inside her still feels missing.

  Hestia contacts her out of the blue. Something about a meeting that she thinks Aphrodite will find beneficial. Hearing from her after so long startles Aphrodite into accepting before realising what she has done.

  ‘I promise,’ Hestia tells her, something in her voice like the breeze that carries a wildfire, ‘you will love it.’

  Aphrodite isn’t much different from the family she came from in her curiosity and fascination for novelties.