Song of the Mytilenian Women, v3

[RiverNotch]

TY for the feedback. Not likely to touch this much further, but will address some questions:
knot:

"They" -- the chorus -- are all the women of Mytilene. The "song" is both the verse I've written (although, as you note, it's not much of a song) and the verses they sing, which are all taken directly from Sappho (as translated by Anne Carson). Indeed, there are two different songs they sing, both of which they sing to their men: in S4 and part of S5, it's autumn, and the men are returning from whatever Ancient Greek men do when they go sailing around the Med, while in the rest of the poem, it's winter, the season for conceivin'. "Ode" and "Paean" during this time are as different from each other as an advertising jingle and a prog rock opus are understood to be different now, with a paean being a song of victory: once the song has done its job, the maidens return to weaving crowns, since they're not technically allowed to mate; the wives, well, you know what the wives do; and Sappho, a poet who by most modern understandings of her works is not likely to have conjugated for bearing children....

busker:

"Some say..." and "Come to us now..." are both verbatim, taken from Anne Carson's translations. I agree that "gloomy", and probably other adjectives, are somewhat banal -- it's my attempt to try and capture what I understand of Ancient Greek poetry's tendency for the idiomatic.