Hero's Burial

[RiverNotch]

Yet another political poem. But eh, the politics ain't very good, and it's been too long since I last wrote something metered, let alone a sonnet.

HERO'S BURIAL

When hubris flew him high into the dawn
then flung him from his horse, Bellerophon
and all his noble peers were stricken blind --
as Pegasus rose and fed on heaven's hay
in Zeus's house, in some forgotten cave
maggots consumed the crashed Corinthian's eyes.
Not even his bones were found and far revered,
nor his youthful combats rich relaid
in epics composed solely for his praise.
But History did not cry, for she kept
her watch upon the mortal's fateful fall,
and, hating her pride and knowing her place, she knew,
as every hero shapes his tale anew,
so he receives or rejects the Hero's burial.

http://www.rappler.com/nation/143007-lun...ero-burial

[billy]

is there a rhyme scheme?

[RiverNotch]

slant AABCCBDEEFGHHI -- i couldn't make the last four lines any more regular

[just mercedes]

I was happy to take 'burial' as a rhyme for 'fall', which makes the last four lines regular enough for me.

Did you intend iambic pentameter throughout? You miss in lines 4, 6 through to 12, and 14.

Bellerophon survived his fall and lived on as a cripple, wandering the earth, bemoaning his fate and looking for Pegasus.

Marcos was no Hero, he was a murderous dictator, and there's no reason why he should be interred in a Heroes Cemetery.

Bellerophon was no military dictator. I'm not really getting the link between them. That both were unseated at the apex of their power?

[RiverNotch]

I kinda did? I at least tried to keep the sense of rhythm.

There really isn't. Thus the point of the poem. Once Marcos got deposed, he was effectively crippled -- never allowed back home, lupus -- until he died about three years later. But of course, Marcos was still filthy rich, and he got some support from all his American friends (or, at least, some omerta), so in that sense, I think, the parallel fails. What I was going for was that the two fell because of hubris -- Bellerophon, in trying to reach the gods, Marcos, in, well, the whole shebang -- and not really that both were unseated at the apex of their power, since I consider Bellerophon's greatest act (as per the stories, I think) to have been the chimera-slaying, as Marcos's act his first term. Although at that point by a lot of accounts he was already a scoundrel (one of the most painful controversies unearthed by this whole Heroes' Cemetery shebang was his faking of military records, which probably stemmed from his first presidential campaign), at least he was a limited one, at most he was an Odysseus. Still, I get your point, and I'm sure there's a better myth out there to jump from -- I'm just a bit too inexperienced to really get that yet, perhaps.