River
the women row the boat
the pink head dresses
announce the cause of the
feminine odyssey---
short and different
in nature and score than
the Homeric one!
they are crossing the wide river
for those struck by a killer
their concerns maternal
hands joined together
in collective enterprise
a new pantheon of heroic
crusaders!
a riverine ode to the human will
that triumphs over a fatal illness
that can easily cripple and defeat
but can never destroy the
human will
Hemingwaysque in stature!
“Homeric” denotes epic, large-scale. The adjective comes from Homeros, the reputed author of the “Odysseus” in the late 8th or early 7th century BCE. A blind bard from Ionia (in modern Turkey, he was called the one who “has taught Greece” by Platon, the 4th-center philosopher. “Hemingwayesque,” after the 20th-century American author, noted for the concentrated, direct, economical, and understated nature of his prose. He employed an iceberg theory of writing which left the bulk of the background story up to the reader’s imagination, employed a multi-focal snapshot narrative that created a collage of images, and cinematically cut from one scene to another or spliced them together. Jackson Benson described his style as haiku-like.
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