Surprises

If my mother,

a woman weary from years of scrubbing floors and waiting tables,

Made tough by a saga of bloody battles and unwanted children,

Taught me one thing,

She taught me to hate surprises.

A surprise, she said,

May look like a box wrapped in paper,

like a cake,

But it really feels more like a

Knife in your back.

When a ship sails into Ithaca’s harbor-

Unannounced,

Uninvited,

But not without a purpose-

My mother’s face appears in my mind.

Beware.

Men wearing the rags of sailors,

the rings of nobleman,

And the darkened eyes of soldiers

Disembark and stumble up Ithaca’s largest hill.

Reaching the stoop of the palace,

The first of them sticks out a calloused hand and knocks.

It swings open,

and just like that, 
something had entered this house.

Like a fruit fly,

slipping in on the breeze.

Odysseus, ever the host and the nobleman,

Welcomes these guests,

As he always does.

He may show dependable hospitality,

But also dependable blindness.

He feels no such breeze.

He does not hear the buzz from the wings of the fruit fly.

The men bathe,

Slipping out of their sailing clothes

And the dirt of their yearlong journey,

Silk robes revealing their true nobility,

So they now look at home in this palace.

Odysseus beckons them to a feast;

He wishes to compound his blindness

With that of drink;

Wise.

They all drink, and eat,

And toast,

Cheers!

And I feel the fly, buzzing around the table.

Then, an hour has passed,

And Odysseus speaks with the captain of the visitors;

No hushed tones, not here,

Only merriment.
Odysseus asks after Menelaus-

The captain revealed in his opening monologue

That he hailed from Sparta-

And this fly morphs into something worse.

The captain opens his mouth,

Stained maroon with goblets of wine,

And tells him of Helen’s infidelity-

She has gone, like a wind over water,

And Menalus has become a tsunami

Reaching up as though to catch and drown

His beloved wife.

At this,

Odysseus’ eyes must begin to see the hint of shadow,

his blindness must cease for a moment;

Looking into the face of catastrophe,

He pales.

The buzz of the fly has become a low hiss,

A snake moving beneath the feet of the sailors,

slithering up the arm of Odysseus’ chair,

Where his hand grips a cup of wine.

I could feel something approaching

With the first sign of a ship.

Odysseus could not.

This snake bites.

3 main choices: For this poem, titled “Surprises,” I began with a brief but important description of the narrator’s mother; by doing so, I established the narrator’s social status as a slave, but I also characterized her as tough, honest, and pessimistic by emphasizing the role of negative and difficult experiences in her family life, and, by establishing these traits early, I hoped to cast this perspective as unique and unfiltered. I also included two recurring motifs, one of wind (“wind over water,” “breeze,”) and animals (“fruit fly” and “snake”,) and while each were symbolic, my use of motifs also aimed to create a mood of fate, preeminence, and eeriness; by including unnerving or evocative symbols, I hoped to emphasize the narrator’s dreamy, prophetic foreboding. To further establish the importance of long-term catastrophe, I described Odysseus as “blind” then repeated this description to convey the narrator’s frustration at his lack of long-term planning: by calling him blind, an obviously figurative description, I indicated that the narrator saw disaster in the future, foreshadowing Odysseus’ later panic.