The Palimpsest of Bríga
My eldest sister claims
I am the reason why
Our mother died the day
I came to life.
She lives in childless hell,
A barren castoff wife,
Worse than the concubine
Kept in her home.
My eldest sister’s man,
A violent drunken brute,
With sneer and swagger strode
Into our home.
Arémori stood still,
Transfixed him with a stare,
Until the sot blacked out
And then collapsed.
The puddle left behind,
A homage to his fear,
Arémori mopped up
All by himself.
He dragged the nuisance out
And laid him by the pigs
Where we suppose he woke
Then ran away.
When I was only ten,
A trader came to call;
My middle sister left
As his new bride.
It takes at least a week
To walk the coastal trail
To where the Tago flows
Into the sea.
Now once a year he comes
To trade and bring us news
Of her and the five sons
That she has borne.
My father fed me love,
A wet nurse fed me milk,
My husband let me learn
My worthiness.
At first I thought him strange,
His silence and his scars,
But in his eyes I saw
His gentle soul.
One night he could not sleep;
The moon was full and white;
He mumbled out the name
Telemachus.
The next day at my loom,
While he was chopping wood,
I asked him what he meant
By what he’d said.
“An old forgotten place,
Lost in the mist of time,
And peopled now by ghosts
Who I once knew.”
My father loved him well
And they worked side by side
Without a single word
To halt the flow.
At night when they would sit
By fire and sip wine,
He whispered only words
My father heard.
At Cempsibriga’s port
The sailors speculate
His knowledge of the stars
Makes him a sage.
Some say he was a king,
Some say he was a thief,
I knew him as a strong
Yet gentle man.
He helped my father build
A shelter for his boat
But never went with him
To set the nets.
He trusted Mother Earth,
The goddess with my name,
And worked the fertile fields
Behind a plow.
Before she learned to walk,
He took Athena there
To let her crawl and play
Among the sods.
Athena has a friend,
A grey-black-feathered owl
Who lives in a safe nest
Under our roof.
She follows her at night,
To watch her feed on mice,
Or capture poison snakes
She tears in two.
The day her father died,
Athena went to sleep
Next to the sacred shrine
That bears her name.
Beneath the slab of stone
Is where he hid the scrolls
Of skin he dried and cured
And wrote upon.
One day I’ll let her see
The treasures in his words
So she can add her fame
To his great name.
My father, bless his soul,
Can neither read nor write.
At his great age his eyes
Can hardly see.
Since we are now alone,
He tells me tales at night,
The marvels of the man
He gave me to.
“I’ve never been to war,
I never sailed so far,
But I would walk by him
Through ice and fire.”
Arémori made words
Shape pictures from his past,
The mostly painful scenes
Of virtue slain.
He could not speak of this,
And so with blade and ink
He cleansed his mind and soul
Of constant grief.
Athena is too young,
But truth will be revealed
So she will know she sprang
From royal blood.
I’ve scraped away this text
And written it anew
At least a hundred times,
But now I’m done.
Arémori is gone;
My father won’t last long;
Athena will live on
Beyond us all.
I am Bríga
Daughter of Goistos
Wife of Arémori
Mother of Athena of Cempsibriga
NOTE
Palimpsest: A manuscript of some reusable material that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely scraped off or erased and often still faintly legible beneath.
