Astyanax Remembered

Calchas settled the boy's fate by prophesying that, if allowed to survive, he would avenge his parents and his city. Though all other princes shrank from infanticide, Odysseus willingly hurled Astyanax from the battlements. But some say that Neoptolemus, to whom Hector's widow Andromache had fallen as a prize in the division of spoil, snatched Astyanax from her, in anticipation of the Council's decree, whirled him around his head by one foot and flung him upon the rocks far below.
— Robert Graves
1
Was it Odysseus, or Neoptolemus,
who stood on the ramparts of Troy
and, without ritual or thought —
as if performing some final act
of freedom — flung his child-self
onto already blood-stained earth,
setting a seal on the war, the future.
Astyanax, the victim of this metaphor,
falls in a soundless arc towards
a chaos of pulped flesh.
2
Tell me what you seek, intones the shaman
they meet on their way to Troy —
waiting by roadsides, walking towards them
through sea mists.
Not ever mentioned
in the texts, he is the one who murmurs
over and over, This does not need to happen.
3
The aim of war is the extinction of hope.
He walks through gutted Troy.
Now a city of illusion, it will be
rebuilt in myth, lost there, found again.
The shaman sits by a small body
in the dust: hallucinating, remembering.