Today's thread in the tapestry is one man's take on writing in a woman's voice. Testament by Gary Hardaway:

Testament  

I am the last to honor time before

the scarred and angry warriors from the north

attacked and brought their cunning, sullen gods.

The torchlight flickers off the stone above,

the ceiling of this ancient cave the scarred

have not discovered yet. I write this, sure

of nothing, in the fading letters of

a dying language. Were I practical,

I would use the words and letters as corrupted

by the northern simplification

of expression we worked centuries to make

complex enough to capture nuance

the scarred declare unnecessary art.

Their nouns are few and stark.

Ours are numerous and dappled

or subtly shaded and shadowed

by circumstance and possibility.

They first came ashore from ships

so small and clumsy one should call them rafts.

They wanted gold or silver, perhaps a few

of the fine bronze weapons they had heard

about in Troy. They offered cheeses, wine,

young breeding goats, and crudely woven wool.

Or, so it was remembered, by those who met them,

before the Calamity, long before my birth,

before our beautiful circular city,

north across the small finger of Sea,

vanished under Earth’s dark spit;

before the swelling of the Sea washed away

our Seaside ports and villages; before the plague

that follows the death of so many together

spread among those the swelling didn’t take;

before the five dark summers, when the sun

dimmed and the crops died, blackened in the fields.

The cunning take the thread of fact and weave

a tapestry that lies to their advantage.

From the faceted complexity of Canossis

comes a labyrinth. From our ceremony of respect

for mindless force we can’t control

but only evade with grace and knowledge,

a monster in the labyrinth. From a king--

chosen, not born, nor thrust upon a race

by murderous alliances-- a cruel tyrant

delighting in the suffering of others.

As we, weakened-- beloved faces reduced

by death to less than half-- were forced to hear, recounted

by the scarred and angry Mycenaeans.

One must learn to give the Bull the things

it needs: space, grass and grain, his mates

and offspring, and elude the things

its momentary fury wants- your death

and those of your sisters and brothers.

One must sadly learn to treat the lion

with similar evasive regard. But our

diplomacy, once revered along

all shores of the Sea, collapsed and died, rebuked.

Our ships once teemed along the shore

like pups at their mother’s teats.

After the swelling of the Sea, the dead

outnumbered the living and the shipwrights

died where they lived, along the Sea.

We had looked at water and the things afloat

and learned the happiest shapes and properties

of hulls. Our ships swam shallow in the Sea,

which made them quick. Our rudders thrust themselves

into the Sea, deep enough to make us

nimble but not so deep as to catch the weeds

that flourish under dazzled water.

After the swelling of the Sea, our ships lay broken,

far inland, ribs exposed like those

of whales ashore, rotting in the sun.

The bodies of the dead lay broken, too,

and bloated. Who survived could not know them.

We piled the pieces of ships and pieces of men

and burned them. Smoke arose to dim the sun.

Perhaps the Earth, Sea, and Sky were done

with us and chose to tatter all we were

and leave it to the Mycenaean swords

and fires to obliterate. What we were

lies ruined and mysterious-- evocation

to the unkind imagination

of the Brute-- alive now only

in the children of concubines and rape.

Against that, this testament, scratched

with misshapen styluses, made

from memory by unskilled hands,

with a pallid memory of ink.

My daughter’s sons and their fathers hunt for me.

I trust she won’t disclose my likely

hiding place, although enslaved and shamed.

But time itself is after me. I slow

with age and pains of wear and elusion.

The jars of brined olives, wined figs,

pickled octopus and squid, grow fewer,

daily. I can only write against

my end of time and hope the parchment

and papyrus will survive the damp

and find both kind and comprehending eyes

before the sun itself grows weary

and extinguishes the last of day.

We once saw giants in the clouds and in

connected points of stars, and named

them, gods.  We placed them in their high-halled villas,

on the mountaintop, to game and frolic

with our lives-- eternal adolescents.

Once we climbed the mountain, we learned that clouds

are insubstantial vapor and the stars

are points of light that turn as we

through repetitious day and night.

The Mycenaeans sweat and slash below

the clouds, servants of capricious gods

and narrow, brutish appetites. They smell

of dirt, semen, ashes, blood and dung.

Before the Calamity, the Sea took

my husband, captain of a quick and agile ship.

I say the Sea, although it may have been

the savages that live beyond Iberia.

Exchange holds risk and reward, fraternal

twins that rise and fall at ends of the scale.

His ship did not return. I joined the other

widowed or solitary women at

the House of Memory and Teaching at Malaeis.

My toddling son and daughter learned with me

the memories and wisdom of the old,

the passions and poems of the young,

the triumphs, confusion and sorrows of those in between.

We grew together. We knew the beauties and

pomposities of neighbors, their frailties and strengths.

Then, the cloud. The crack and rumble, like thunder.

The sickening back and forth of the ground.

And, later, the swell of the Sea, its unbroken

wave, higher than the walls of the great

House at Canossis, surging, with its death,

a hundred ship lengths inland. Sudden cries.

A crash of ships and houses. Then, the silence.

Who could stood up and looked and cursed their eyes.

The cries and whimpers of the undead cursed their ears.

Who lived breathed in the death and found their bodies

broken in ways invisible. Salt and bitter the only tastes

on the tongue. Decay the only odor in the nose.

The astonishing silence and whimpering

the only sounds the ears can hear. The cold

of dead skin the only sensation on the flesh.

The dark smoke of pyres the only sight.

The rivers ran salty, dead fish and the unrecovered

dead the only cargo floating toward the Sea.

The undead sorted as they could, repaired

and scrubbed what wasn’t ruined, salvaged stone

and timber, hinges and handles. Small boats fished

and netted what they could. A pantomime

of order, effort and routine. The songs,

all dirges and laments. The dances but foot

following foot unto exhausted sleep.

Who lived were lambs, stunned by clubs before

the knife tip bleeds the veins before the feast.

Mycenaean warriors thought us priestesses

in thrall and service to our gods. Their superstition

saved our lives but not our rooms and lovingly

stored and labeled tablets, scrolls, and layered

poem-leaves. Ours, and all the Houses

of Memory and Teaching, restored, were burned

to ash and broken stone. No superstition

saved our sons and brothers. Blood and bodies

stained the roads and courtyards.

We were a people, whole and happy, once.

We were enamored with the repetitions

and surprises of the world. Our bodies, first,

and spirits, after, were broken by

the forces that hide inside the Earth, Sea

and Sky. Our remains were scattered, then,

by knowing choices of joyless brutes

who stand like men but are a cunning plague.

We were Athlanti. We were Canossis. We were

Malaeis, Phaestos, and Thera, city of the circle.

We were fleet and nimble ships, the leapers of Bulls.

We were language and curiosity, exchange

and memory. Now, we are the stories

scarred and angry men, insecure

in their own leadership and worth,

will speak around a fire on ground not theirs.