The Lame God
“When I'm alone here at night I cuddle him and hold him. Sometimes, I even try to make him walk." - Nurse in one of the “Lying Down Rooms” in an orphanage in Russia, where, because of the social stigma of crippled children, they are rejected by their parents and committed to the state.
 

He walked on thin legs, as Homer put it.
     Hephaestus, born with a shriveled foot
          that so humiliated Hera

she threw her son into the sea. Once tossed
     from high Olympus, he turned his frailty
          into grit: counterinsurgency. A terra

firma, as opposed to the water she dreamed of,
     his exile made him face his kind,
          build her a catbird seat -- a throne

with a trick release to trap her like the imperfections
     she reviled.  In the end, he hobbled,
          motherless castaway, into their pantheon.

What was it made the Greeks admit a lame god
     into their heaven? In all of their myths, his wit
          and craftsmanship. But there was plenty

of that to go around. What if the Greek Ideal
     that gave them height, relied, for good form,
          on what the gods despised --  a symmetry

of damned and apple of their eyes. Twins on a coin,
     a champion form: what men could learn to love;
          what the state wished was never born.


Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey.  All rights reserved.
Forthcoming in
The Spoon River Poetry Review, Summer 2008