Twenty years, every day,
The figures in the web she wove
Came and stood and went away.
Her fingers in their pitiless play
Beat downward as the shuttle drove
Slowly, slowly did they come,
With horse and chariot, spear and bow,
Half-finished heroes sad and mum,
Came slowly to the shuttle’s hum.
Time itself was not so slow.
And what at last was there to see?
A horse’s head, a trunkless man,
Mere odds and ends about to be,
And the thin line‘of augury
Where through the web the shuttle ran.
How could she bear the mounting load,
Dare once again her ghosts to rouse?
Far away Odysseus trod
The treadmill of the turning road
That did not bring him to hus house.
The weary loom, the weary loom,
The task grown sick from morn tonight,
From year to year. The treadle’s boom
Made a low thunder im the room.
The woven phantoms mazed her sight.
If she had pushed it to the end,
Followed the shuttle’s cunning song
So far she had no thought to rend
In time the web from end to end,
She would have worked a matchless wrong.
Instead, that jumble of heads and spears,
Forlorn scraps of her treasure trove.
I wet them with my childish tears
Not knowing she wove into her fears
Pride and fidelity and love.