Dear Merope, Which Rhymes with Therapy

Ah, I bet you forgot Sisyphus. It’s easy to forget, given the whole up-down-stone-sweat-start-over-effort thing. And…did you forget Merope, too?

According to Greek myth, Merope (which actually does rhyme with therapy) was the wife of Sisyphus. She is one of the Pleiades, seven sisters born from the Titan Atlas. They are eventually put into the sky to escape Orion, the hunter, where you find both the hunter and the Pleiades still.

Merope is the seventh sister, the faintest of the stars. The idea is that she turns her face away, because she is so ashamed to be married to the deceitful, braggart Sisyphus. Whereas her sisters were all mated to gods (3 to Zeus, 2 to Poseidon, 1 to Ares). Hence you can’t see her (or can barely see her embarrassed pink blush) as the seventh star of the Pleiades.

Poor Merope.

On the one hand, she gets stuck with a mortal King, who one-ups everyone on the deceit and arrogance scales. On the other hand, she at least gets loyalty, which you cannot argue the other sisters received. Sisyphus may be a crappy husband, but he at least isn’t running around with other women/nymphs/goddesses. He’s too busy tricking the gods.

And one thing Sisyphus is, if nothing else, is smart. Even when that means he doesn’t like what he sees in himself. He isn’t deluded, and he acknowledges his failings. He doesn’t do much to overcome them, but he admits they exist. And he has, after who knows how many times pushing that d#@M stone up the hill, developed some small tinge of remorse for those innocents, like Merope, who got trampled under along his path.

Which implies the punishment is working, sort of. It also makes me think he writes her notes from Hades. Something like this one:

Written from that “Other” Place

Dear Merope,

Which rhymes with therapy,
which probably I ought get more of,
and probably you think no use
where one such as I am concerned.

Isn’t that always the way?
Victims need be helped and victees—
victimizers, victors?—
need only condemnation.

Only you understood, dear Merope,
how the world enshrouded in gray
was our reality, navigated day by day.
Lovely girl, smarter than all those other stars

you call Sister, each no more than prey
for Orion’s ceaseless hounds. Baying,
across a dark vacuum, external
evidence of his internal life, nay

he cannot hide his heart, no more than
I hide my gratitude, small though it may
seem to you, a poor pebble of thanks
grinding my heel, a small ray

of sunrise making me, though only to you,
human. Or human-like. Human-ish.
Something close to something okay,
acceptable, a way out of this crevasse.

This is only a sad substitute for all the days
you dreamed a better life. I’ve cheated
you, you whom I never tried to hurt,
you the one person, being, soul
I wanted not to suck into this Hades-hole.

If you enjoyed Written from that “Other” Place

I know it is diffcult to see, in the photo above, the Pleiades or M45 star cluster in relation to Orion, the hunter. That is Orion, roughly in the middle of the pic, pointing his bow and arrow toward the upper right.

You can see more, and more clearly, on NASA’ s website.

You’ll find more of my poems on this blog or in the collection Stars Crawl Out From Their Caves, which is available in both ebook and print.  Missed a poem of the week? Links to prior weeks are on this page.

This is Thanksgiving Week in the U.S., and if it applies to you, I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving holiday. Please feel free to drop any messages regarding this week’s poem in the comments.

Happy Thanksgiving!  Have a great week!