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pain,
come to us now!

     

page_26
Page 26
200 The blows I suffer are past count.
Plague kills my friends,
thought finds no spear
to keep a man safe.
Our rich earth shrivels what it grows,
our women in labor scream
but nothing's born. One life
after another flies,
you see them go
birds driving their strong wings
210 faster than flash-fire
to the shore of the sunset god.
Our city dies as its people die
those countless deaths, her children
rot in the streets, unmourned,
spreading more death.
Young wives and gray mothers
wash to our altars, their cries
carry from all sides, sobbing
for help, each lost in her pain.
220 A hymn shining to the Healer
is darkened by a grieving voice,
a flute in a courtyard.
Help us, Goddess,
golden child of Zeus,
send us the bright face
we need: Strength.
Force that raging killer, the god Ares,
to turn his back and run from our land.
He murders without armor now
230 but we, the victims of his fever,
shout in the hot blast of his charge.
Blow Ares to the great searoom
of Amphitrité, banish him
under a booming wind
to jagged harbors in the seas
roiling off Thrace. If night
doesn't finish the god's black work,
the day will finish it.
The lightning waits
240 in your fiery will,
Zeus, Father. Send its blast
to kill the god killing us.

     

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Apollo,
lord of the morning light, draw back
your curving bowstring
of twined goldfire the sure arrows
that rake our attackers and keep them at bay.
Artemis, carry your radiance
into battle, on bright quick feet
250 down through the morning hills.
I call on the god whose hair
flows through its golden band,
whose name is our country's own,
Bakkhos!the wine-flushed!who comes
to the maenads' cries, who runs
in their midst: Bakkhos!
come here on fire,
a pine-torch flaring,
to face with us the one god
260 all the gods hate: Ares!
(Oedipus has entered while the Chorus was singing. Now he speaks.)
OEDIPUS I heard your prayer. Prayer may save you yet
if you will trust me and do what I say:
work with me toward the one cure
this plague demands of us.
Help will come, the plague will lift.
I now outlaw the killer myself, by these words.
I act as a stranger, not familiar
either with this crime or accounts of it.
Unless I can mesh some clue I hold
270 with something known of the killer,
I will be tracking him alone, on a cold trail.
Since I came later to join your ranks,
when the crime itself was past history,
there are some things that you,
the sons of Kadmos, must tell me.
If any of you knows how Laius,.
son of Labdacus, died, he must
instantly tell me all he knows.
He must not be frightened of naming
280 himself the guilty one: I swear
he'll suffer nothing worse than exile.
Or if you know of someone else,
a foreigner who struck the blow, speak up.

     

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I will reward you now, I will thank you always.
But if you know the killer and don't speak,
out of fear, to shield kin or yourself,
listen to what that silence will cost you.
I order everyone in my land
where I hold power and sit as king:
290 don't let that man under your roof,
don't speak with him, no matter who he is.
Don't pray or sacrifice with him,
don't pour purifying water for him.
I say this to all my people:
drive him from your houses.
He is our sickness. He poisons us.
This the Pythian god has shown me.
Believe me, I am the ally in this
both of the god and the dead king.
300 I pray god that the unseen killer,
whoever he is, and whether he killed
alone or had help, be cursed with a life
as evil as he is, a life
of utter human deprivation.
I pray this, too: if he's found at my hearth,
inside my house, and I know that he's there,
may the curses I aimed at others punish me.
I charge you allgive my words force,
for my sake and the god's, for our dead land
310 stripped barren of its harvests,
forsaken by its gods.
Even if god had not forced the issue,
this crime should not have gone uncleansed.
You should have looked to it!the dead man
not only being noble, but your king.
But as my luck would