Twined in Bronze: Achilles Among the Shades

by Donald S. Yarab

Prelude: The Calling Across the Void

Hear me, O boundless halls of shadow, where no lyre sounds save memory’s echo,
where the voices of the upper world drift down like falling leaves,
carrying my name—swift-footed, godlike, breaker of men—
yet here, in this silence deeper than death’s first breath,
I am but shade calling to shade across the voiceless deep.

Not as I was in life do I summon you, O dwellers in darkness,
swift of foot upon Trojan soil, terrible in bronze and wrath,
but as one among the countless dead who wander here,
seeking not the glory that the living world still sings,
but what no song can restore, no fame redeem.

By Acheron’s dark waters, by Cocytus’ wailing stream,
if any shade remembers love, if any echo bears my grief,
come forth from asphodel’s pale meadows,
enter not Lethe’s merciful waters—
let me embrace again what I have lost, not the glory I have won.

The Encounter with Odysseus

Through the mists of the unremembering came Odysseus,
his words still honey-bright, his tongue still silver-edged:

“Achilles, no shade walks more blessed than you among the dead!
In life, you were honored as a god among mortals;
here, you are lord of the departed.
Above, the poets crown you with undying flame—
your name will never perish from the lips of men.”

But I answered him, bitter with the dust of ages:
“Do not gild my shadow, son of Laertes.
Better to be a hireling alive, a drudge to some poor man
who scratches bread from stubborn earth,
than king among these silent multitudes.
For what is glory here, where no heart beats to hear it?
Your songs reach my name but cannot touch my soul;
they raise me to eternity yet leave me hollow as wind through bone.”

The Shade of Patroclus

Then—O mercy of the pitiless dark—I thought I heard you, Patroclus,
soft as breath through withered leaves,
faint as the last note of a dying lyre string:

“They did not forget me, Achilles…
my name is bound to yours in bronze and grief.
They sang my fall beneath the walls of Troy,
they sang your wrath that shook the earth and sky.
They knew… they knew I was beloved.”

“O Patroclus,” I cried across the gulf of silence,
“O companion of my heart, O dearer than breath—
yes, they sang you, but they knew only shadows.
They praised my spear but not your steadying hand,
they heard my wrath but not our laughter in the tents,
they saw my grief but not the mornings when you woke
and the world was whole because you breathed within it.
Glory is one thing, beloved, but your nearness was another,
greater than all the songs that mortals weave.”

Then darker came your voice, like distant thunder:
“Yet had you not brooded, had you not nursed your wounded pride,
I might have lived to see another dawn.
I wore your armor, Achilles, and with it, your doom—
my blood became the price of your great wrath,
my grave the shadow of your choice.
They sing your glory, but it is built upon ashes from my pyre.”

I reached through the darkness, but my hands closed only on emptiness,
and you dissolved like mist before the merciless sun.

The Voice of Echo

Then from the depths where memory dwells eternal,
Echo came, bearing fragments of what was,
and in her broken voice I heard my mother’s prophecy,
scattered like pearls upon the wine-dark deep:

“Two fates… two fates bear you toward death’s end…
toward death’s end, my son…
If here you remain… remain fighting the sons of Troy…
brief is your life… brief… but your glory undying…
undying through all the generations of men…
If homeward you sail… you sail to Phthia’s shore…
long life awaits… awaits… but your name dies with you…
dies with you like smoke upon the wind…”

“Two roads… two roads I set before you…
before you, child of my bitter grief…
Choose… choose… but know that I will lose you…
lose you in either path you take…”

Her voice faded like waves withdrawing from a distant shore,
leaving me more orphaned than before,
knowing now the weight of what I chose,
the golden chain that binds my doom.

The Torment of the Fates

Then came the daughters of Necessity,
Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos stern,
their voices cold as iron, pitiless as winter stars:

“No thread is rewoven, son of Thetis;
what is cut by our shears remains cut.
You chose the song of men, and it is sung forever;
you chose the path of wrath, and it is walked to its end.
Dream not of other dawns, for the spindle turns not backward.
The pattern is complete, the weaving done—
you are bound within your own bright doom,
remembered by all the world, and yet undone.”

Their laughter rang like bronze on bronze,
a sound to crack the pillars of the world,
and in that cruel music I heard the truth:
I am the hero of my own destruction,
the author of my endless, empty fame.

Epilogue: The Wisdom of Shadows

So here I abide, Achilles famed beyond forgetting,
yet hollow as the caves where no wind stirs.
From Lethe’s bank to Styx’s binding waters,
the shades whisper my name with reverence,
but reverence is cold comfort to the dead.

O Patroclus, my brother, my breath made flesh—
they remember our names twined in bronze and sorrow,
but none recall the quiet mornings when you woke
and smiled, and the world was made new.
The poets crown me with eternal fire,
but eternity burns cold without you near.

Learn this, you who still draw breath beneath the sun:
choose not wrath over love, nor fame over the hand beside you.
One dawn with the beloved, one moment’s grace
when heart speaks truly unto heart,
is worth more than all the ages of song.
Better to be forgotten with love’s warmth upon you
than to blaze forever in the cold halls of memory,
alone.

The Inversion Cycle: Eight Scrolls of Withheld Grace

The Counterpoint of Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, also called The Wreck of Hope
Oil on canvas paint, 96.7 cm × 126.9 cm (1823–1824). — **Caspar David Friedrich, *The Sea of Ice,* also called The Wreck of Hope**
Oil on canvas, 96.7 cm × 126.9 cm (**1823–1824).**

On the Unmaking of Benediction

This cycle of verses—The Inversion Cycle—emerged not as a contradiction, but as a counterweight to The Blessing of Morpheus: The Sending Forth, a series of benedictions articulated in reverent tones and metaphysical gestures within the poem Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky. That earlier work was rooted in the soul’s deep yearning toward the ineffable, culminating in luminous affirmations bestowed by the dream-god Morpheus upon the seeker. In time, those benedictions came to feel too complete, too resolved. I began to wonder: what if they failed?

The Inversion Cycle is not blasphemy, but a form of apophatic honesty. It does not seek to erase Ponder, but to stand beside it—its negative counterpoint. Each scroll of the cycle corresponds to a specific line or blessing from Ponder and performs an act of unmaking: where Morpheus blesses, these verses refrain; where he sends the seeker into mystery, these verses stall at the threshold; where he assures, they withhold.

To honor that reversal, a further restraint was imposed: the exclusion of the very vocabulary upon which the original work (and many of my other recent works) so often relied. Words such as breath, dust, light, shadow, silence, and memory—among others—have been set aside. Their absence is not a loss but a signal. These are not the tools we are permitted to carry here.

The scrolls appear here in the same order as the benedictions from Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky. This reversal respects the original arc—from the loosening of dreams to the transformation of the soul—and follows its negative path with precision.

What remains is austerity, not despair. These unsacraments do not offer consolation, but they do speak. If Ponder was a song of ascent, then this is the long exhale after the music ends—a psalter of withheld grace, composed in the space where blessing does not descend.

Let this work be read not in defiance of belief, but in the trembling of its undoing. For if it is brave to bless, it is perhaps braver still to stand in the space where blessing will not come—and write there, in the dust, what remains.

Scroll I: Of the Clinging Husk

Let not your dreams fall—
for they will not fall.
They remain,
clinging like husks unpicked,
blackened not by season,
but by refusal.

You will try to cast them down,
but they are fastened,
not to limb,
but to marrow.

They do not curl like leaves.
They do not return to soil.
They sour upon you,
a bitterness in the sinew,
a ferment in the thought.

And if you turn to shake them loose,
they will tighten.
Their threads are not of sleep,
but of habit,
knotted in long forgetting.

There is no wind to lift them.
No frost to loosen them.
No gardener comes.

Remain, then, beneath their burden—
bent,
unshed,
unchanged.

Scroll II: Of the Inscribed Weight

Take them.
You will take them.
You cannot help it.

The names carved into stone,
the words burned into walls,
the cries etched into earth—
they cling not to your pack,
but to your ribs.

You bear them not as titles,
but as scars.

They whisper through your marrow,
resisting every act of unmaking.
You try to enter the place without form,
but they speak before you.
They call the ground by its old name,
and the gate does not open.

Even the sky does not answer
when it hears them rising again.

These names were not carved to remember.
They were carved to bind.

And now,
as you stand at the edge
of the place where all naming ends,
they press their syllables
against your tongue,
and you speak them,
not in defiance,
but because you cannot forget.

Scroll III: Of Implements Abandoned

Bring not the weighted balances,
nor the woven snares of longing.
They do not hold,
not here.

Their handles crack in the frost
where no stars rise to bless the hour.
Their mesh is brittle—threaded not of wool,
but of claims left too long in the mouth.

The mind, honed to edge,
cuts only fog in this place.
The heart, cupped too gently,
spills what it never held.

There are no laurels in this soil,
only reeds that do not bend
and brambles that do not bleed.

And should you cast such tools before you,
expecting fruit, or fire, or favor—
they will return to you as ash,
unsought, unshaped,
the chaff of means
mistaken for ends.

Scroll IV: Of the Withheld Offering

Bring not your hollowed chest,
stripped clean of ornaments and plea.
It will not be filled.

Wonder has no purchase here.
Its gaze returns unreflected
from stone too smooth to be shaped.

Let the mind remain loud and unyielding,
for awe would shatter in this poise
like frost-cracked bronze.

As for your feet—
do not lift them.
There is no basin here,
only ground dry from the beginning,
lined with rings that do not ripple.

The wind does not attend.
It does not lift.
It does not listen.

There is no path across this floor,
only grit,
and the marks of those who came
thinking they would walk upon revelation.

Scroll V: Of the False Horizon

Do not seek.
There is no one to be found.

The sea does not receive you.
It is not fluid,
but glare stretched to the edge of motion—
shimmering not with promise,
but with mirage.

You did not launch.
You drifted.
And your craft was not chosen,
but assigned,
drawn from timbers
meant for no voyage.

The sky above you swells with stars,
but none are true.
Each one marks a path
that bends inward,
circling you back to your forgetting.

You will think you move.
You will call it seeking.
You will call it bold.
But you are already known
by the thing that does not answer.
And it has left no threshold,
only wind
that cannot be charted
and depth that does not hold.

Scroll VI: Of the Barren Threshold

There is no beyond.
Only the gray field where sleep forgets its end
and waking does not begin.

Here, nothing waits.
Not voice, not veil,
not even the last gasp of wonder.

What lies past dream is not fullness,
but poise robbed of sanctity—
the deafness of stones
before their naming.

No stars ever hung above this place.
No fire traced its vault.
Only pallor,
dull as bone in a dry shrine,
untouched by flame or veil.

And death,
so often imagined a gate,
has no depth here.
It is shallow, crusted,
and holds nothing but its own refusal.

Let no one say this place is holy.
It is not what remains made full—
but vacancy made permanent.

A place unmourned.
Uncalled.
Unmade.

Scroll VII: Of the Unbecome

Go not.
There is nowhere that calls.
No road unfurls before you,
no veil parts,
no watchful eye lingers on your vanishing.

The question you bore
was not accepted.
It curled back into you,
like a tongue that feared its own utterance.

You will not be shaped by asking,
nor known by your seeking.
You will remain
as you were before the yearning—
a vessel without fracture,
never poured,
never filled.

No sound will rise behind you.
No trace will stir where your feet passed.
Even the soil will forget your weight.

Be still, not in peace,
but in the form that does not unfold.
Remain—not as the question—
but as that which never found its shape.

Scroll VIII: The Soul Beneath the Blanched Sky

The soul, girded and unmoved,
stood beneath a sky without veil—
a dome blanched of fire,
where nothing had ever gleamed,
only ash adrift from unremembered pyres.

It bore no garment.
No mark of calling or descent.
It was as parchment without script,
unhandled, unblemished, unread.

No winds stirred the plain.
Only cairns rose in rows,
not raised in reverence,
but born of the land’s refusal to yield.

The trees there had no buds.
Their limbs were stiff, as if carved for stillness—
a forest of halted prayers.
And beneath them,
the roots did not seek nourishment,
but curled inward,
content in their forgetting.

There was no calm,
no sacred pause.
Instead, a muttering of syllables
rose from the dry hollows—
sounds without grammar,
without bond,
giving rise to no names,
no intelligible form.

And when the soul pressed its palm
to the ground,
there was no spring,
no pulse,
only crusted clay—
neither moist nor cracked,
a firmness that would not give.

It asked nothing.
Not from pride,
but from knowing
that some places are beyond summons—
places where even longing
has been turned to stone.

Betwixt Dawn and Dusk: A Meditation on Life and Dream

Preface

The first lines of this poem came to me in the night—those strange hours when thought and dream pass like shadows through the mind. I awoke briefly, not fully, and the phrase lingered: between and betwixt dawn and dusk… and the inverse, between and betwixt dusk and dawn. I held onto it until morning, when I set it down in full light. The poem that followed is a meditation on those intervals—the thresholds of consciousness and the veils through which the soul moves in its waking and its dreaming.

What begins as a reflection on the daily arc—from sunrise to sunset—soon turns inward, toward the more uncertain passage between dusk and dawn, where memory, time, and identity unravel and reweave. The Heraclitean epigraph provides the key: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Yet even that distinction, perhaps, is not so firm as it seems.

The accompanying painting—Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket—mirrors the poem’s atmosphere: its drift between form and dissolution, its reverent wondering, its silence punctuated by brief illumination. Together, word and image ask not what life is, but whether it is lived or dreamed—and what remains of us in either case.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
James McNeill Whistler (c. 1872–1877)
Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm (23.7 × 18.3 in)
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit — James McNeill Whistler, *Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket*
c. 1872–1877 | Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Betwixt the Spheres

by Donald S. Yarab

“The waking have one common world,
but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 89

Betwixt the dawn’s gold-burnished, trembling rise,
And evening’s hush where embered echoes gleam,
A soul drifts outward under waking skies—
Or inward, through the latticework of dream.

Morning declares the world as firm and real,
Noon lays its claim in certainties and fire,
Yet twilight draws the veil we cannot feel,
And sings the hush of unfulfilled desire.

The hours fall like leaves from unseen trees,
Their passage soft, impermanent, and strange.
Some name it life, who walk it by degrees—
While others call it dream, and feel no change.

So tell me, when the final light has flown,
And silence hangs, unbroken and immense—
Was it a road we walked, and called our own,
Or but a fleeting spark in dream’s pretense?

But what of time when sun has slipped from sight,
And stars drift forth like seeds of the unknown?
What voice is heard within the hush of night,
When all the world lies still, and we—alone?

Between and betwixt the dusk and morning’s grace,
A different kind of being comes to bloom:
Where shadows speak, and time forgets its place,
And long-dead voices gather in the gloom.

In sleep, the veil grows thin, the borders bend,
And hours bleed into realms that none can chart.
The soul recalls what lies beyond the end,
And bears the hush of ages in its heart.

These hours are not lost—they are the deep,
The ocean floor where buried visions gleam.
From them we rise, like wanderers from sleep,
Still marked by fire, still echoing the dream.

So stands the soul, on thresholds vast and wide,
Between and betwixt the turning of the spheres—
What seemed a life, a dream walks at its side,
Measured not in hours, but in wonder—and in tears.

My Friend, You Were There: A Reflection on Complicity

History shows that evil rarely marches under banners we immediately recognize. Too often, it comes draped in righteousness, purity, and fear. This piece is a lament for how easily we have been—and still can be—drawn into the machinery of cruelty.

My Friend, You Were There

My friend,
When the Holy Catholic Church, seeking to preserve the Faith in all its radiant purity,
instituted the Inquisition,
you were there—
not as a bystander,
but as a willing voice.

You denounced the old widow,
who lived alone with her cat.
You whispered against the Jewish family—
familiar, yet forever marked as other—
and gave your assent to their undoing.

You crowded into the square to watch the trials.
You sang hymns
as the flames crowned their bodies with smoke.
You wept tears of joy
that the world was made purer that day.

My friend,
When the ships came heavy with human cargo,
and the auction blocks stained the soil,
you were there.

You placed your bids.
You weighed their flesh.
You wrote the laws that chained their children.

You sang hymns on Sunday,
and broke their backs on Monday.
You called it providence.
You called it order.

My friend,
When the traders came with flags and rifles,
when the rivers flowed with rubber and blood,
you were there.

You signed the charters.
You counted the profits.
You sold the shackles and the scales.

You called it commerce.
You called it destiny.

My friend,
When the banners of the Reich unfurled,
and the drums of destiny beat their hollow call,
you were there.

You shouted with the crowds
as glass shattered from shopfronts.
You signed the letters,
you cheered the laws,
you raised your hand high in salute.

You bought the house,
the shop,
the art your neighbors were forced to leave behind.

You praised the strong hand
that swept away the weak.
You rejoiced as neighbors vanished,
grateful that your streets were made clean.

My friend,
When Stalin summoned the will of the people
to root out the enemy within,
you were there.

You reported the whispered doubts
of your cousin,
your friend,
your brother.

You paraded with red flags
while the trucks rumbled into the night.
You filled the quotas.
You seized the land.
You counted the spoils
as others disappeared.

You sang of the bright tomorrow
as you cast your eyes down
and stepped over the absent.

My friend,
When Mao lifted the Little Red Book,
and the children cried out against their fathers,
you were there.

You led the chants.
You scrawled denunciations across the walls.
You struck the old professor who dared to hesitate.
You cheered as the temples fell,
and the old poems burned,
convinced you were building a paradise
on the bones of the past.

My friend,
When Pol Pot promised that the fields
would bloom with new life,
you were there.

You marched the teachers into the paddies.
You pointed the rifle.
You praised the year zero
that would erase the memory of all that came before.

You smiled
as the world was reborn in silence.

My friend,
When the generals rose in the name of order,
when the prisons filled and the stadiums overflowed,
you were there.

You nodded at the names.
You counted the profits.
You watched the blindfolded taken at night.

You called it security.
You called it salvation.

My friend,
You have always been there.

Only too late did you realize.
Only too late did you doubt—
but not much.

You fell silent,
lest you betray your doubt.
You looked away,
lest you see.

You told yourself it would be different this time.
You told yourself you had learned.
But the signs are familiar.
The words are familiar.
The silence is familiar.

And it is happening again.

I Am Undone: A Descent Through Unraveling

**The vague glimmer of a head suspended in space**
(1891, Lithograph)
Odilon Redon (1840–1916)

Author’s Note

This poem emerged from reflection upon the moments when something—unspoken, unnamed—shatters the center from which we speak and think. It is not always violence that undoes us, but stillness, silence, a breath held too long.

I Am Undone is not a narrative of healing, nor of hope. It is the descent, rendered faithfully: from coherence to fragmentation, from identity to question, from the sentence to the unsaid. It may speak to trauma, or grief, or loss—or any of life’s other vicissitudes—but it seeks no cause. Only witness.

Let it stand as a record of that moment when words fail, and still we reach for them.

I Am Undone

by Donald S. Yarab

I. Recognition

It came not with fury, nor with fire.
Not a blow, but a breath withheld.
A stillness uncoiling in the spine.
I did not cry out. I did not fall.
I said only—I am undone.
And the words were true,
though I did not yet know
how much they would mean.

II. Unbinding

The star chart curled into ash.
Landmarks dimmed, receded,
folded into fog.
I had names once—
for the road, the self, the longing.
They rusted in my mouth.
I said again, am I—
but the word faltered.
Was I I? Was am still?
Was undone the end, or only
a door swinging inward with no floor?

III. Disorientation

I wandered, perhaps.
Or stood still and the world wandered past.
The days no longer linked.
Events occurred—but not to me.
Faces mouthed shapes I could not
hear or remember.
I touched a wall that had always been there.
It crumbled under my hand.
I called it home, or meant to.
Or once had.
I think.

Un—done—I am—undone am I—
I am…am I…?

IV. Unmooring

And the past…
no, the shape before the past—
was it mine?
Or borrowed from the eyes of others?
Their eyes are gone.
The mirror does not
answer.
I meant to say a thing—
some thing—
a small
thing—
but the mouth no longer forms
what the mind no longer sends.

There is no forward.
There is no back.
There is no—

(no is)

V. Dissolution

I think I said—I was—
no. I had said.
Once.

Undone.
It was the word. I said it.
Before.
Or after.
I do not—

No shape to the day.
No frame to the thought.
They come—go—
without edge.

The name of the thing
was… not there.
And the word for that—
what was the word?
The word is gone.
The knowing is
not.

I am
        am I
                un—
        not
     not done—
            not I—
      I—was

(was?)

And now—