Medusa

Temples are quiet places for forbidden kisses,

for moments in which the world does not exist,

but is collapsing, as if the giant holding us up decides

to let us fall, as if no gods can reach us.

Temples are quiet places for goddesses to unleash their rage.

It is behind marble pillars,

to the soft music of fountains,

where the aegis-bearing warrior,

her hair tied back, showing her eyes, the colour

of a stormed sunset settling over the ocean,

pulls the priestess from the rest of the world,

so that the golden lekythos shatters,

dropped, oil pouring, seeping through cracks

like a cancer, covering skin of a man who no longer

stands there, and the whiteness of the temple floor,

into the warrior's sandals.

The priestess, bare footed, is forgotten by it.

Men in taverns claiming to 'know their Greek' will say

that the priestess begged for mercy,

that she didn't mean to tarnish something so sacred,

that the warrior, enraged, pulled her hair, strand by strand.

Women know different.

The warrior soothes the priestess,

and promises nothing like that will ever happen again to her,

that her beauty is cursed, and the warrior saves her

from the people who want to take her,

to take advantage of her and her beauty.

Her face merges,

melting like the witch in an old movie,

wrinkles push through the crowds of her veins,

until every green-and-blue line is visible,

and she's calling out in pain.

A shard of glass shows her face, so ugly

compared to what it once was.

Jealousy at the more beautiful priestesses,

who were once so minor next to her,

become as obvious as her veins,

serpents colliding with her skull,

her head exploding without blood,

hissing from her cranium.

Nobody will never find her beautiful again.

And those who dare to look will suffer for it,

permanently stuck in their place,

eyes staring at the last thing they'd ever see.

Her own.

Her eyes are the only thing that the warrior couldn't rid for her,

They are Zeus' lightning and Poseidon's gentle sea,

every god, every goddess, have gifted such special eyes,

so that they burst with oranges, golds, and blues,

so that it is a field of a thousand flowers growing in a lush field.

She decides that nothing is more beautiful than them,

that having them as your last sight wouldn't be so bad,

but still she can not bear to look in the mirror,

and see what she has become.

Stone hearted, just like those she leaves behind.

She is used as a warning,

Embracing it, she writes on her wall,

"Beware, for here is the cave of Medusa, Queen of the Gorgons."

What's so bad about being a monster anyway?